The heroine paradigm differs from that of the male hero. There are three faces reflected in the mirror. The two versions of the female’s pathway to heroism are seen in the contrasting myths of Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, and the tale of Eros and Psyche.
The paradigm for the dual versions of the male hero’s career corresponds to the physiological changes that are occasioned by the onset of puberty. The duality of the male paradigm, however, does not correspond to the physiology of a female’s development. In addition to puberty, the female experiences a second change occasioned by menopause. There are three stages to a female’s experience.
In addition, males and females seem to have a different instinctual way of reacting to the other members of their sex. Men typically mark out a territory and defend it against other male intruders. They relate to other men antagonistically, either in sport individually or as a team, against another team or an opposing army. Sport is a pacified version of war. In myth, the male confronts himself beyond the reflected image in the mirror.
Females, however, tend to group together. This bonding, moreover, in societies or situations where women live sequestered together, affects their reproductive cycles, so that they tend to synchronize their menstruation, not only with each other, but also with the phases of the moon. Its three periods (waxing, full, and waning) contrast with the diurnal and annual solar phases that are associated with the male. Both sun and moon experience a disappearance and return (night, new moon).
There is still another major difference between the sexes in their experience of living. Puberty for the male liberates him from the family and sends him out to confront the challenge of his identity. For the female, however, both the onset of menstruation at puberty and its cessation at menopause are more troubling changes, with disturbing emotional symptoms leading them into the mysteries of their own bodies. Pregnancy and motherhood, in addition, tie the female down to a particular place.
The old woman, who has lived through both physiological transitions, becomes the bearer of secret knowledge, not only about females, but also about their synchronicity with the cycles of nature and the cosmos and their closer association with Gaia or the Earth. Typically, this also involves expertise with medicinal and magical plants. Since these women were once the gateway into life through birthing, they also control the passage into death through the rituals of burial.
Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà (‘Our Lady of Sorrows’) depicted the Virgin mother and the crucified Son as a female and a male of the same age, and the gestures of their fingers employed the conventional symbolism of the Renaissance to indicate that they were lovers. The Pietà is erotic. The Virgin shows no signs of grief, but radiates majestic serenity. This makes the birthing mother into the gateway into death. Similarly, in the depictions of the death of the Virgin, termed the Dormition—Falling Asleep—or the Ascension, it was a commonplace to depict the Christ Child as an infant at the old woman’s deathbed. After the Ascension, Mary was elevated to the Queen of Heaven—Regina Coeli, the spouse of her own resurrected son Jesus.
Pietà, known as Our Lady of Sorrows
There are paradoxically three faces, three halves, reflected in the mirror for the female: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Each face poses a riddle of identity for a woman. This enigma constitutes the female’s heroic quest. These three stages of the female and their paradox are expressed in the figure of the goddess Hecate. She is always depicted as a triad of three women, back to back, carrying various ritual mystery implements and sometimes with differing headgear, but always all three are identical maidens, although Hecate was in her totality the reunion of maiden, mother, and crone. Together, they are the patrons of the secrets of witchcraft and the power of the female.
Hecate is the guardian of the juncture where one road branches into two other directions. As such, the three roads of Hecate are a perfect comparison to the two masculine roads of Janus, who sometimes, as we mentioned, can have a female face, as well as a male, as suggestive of the male’s femininity. In addition, Hecate symbolizes the role of the midwife and the wet nurse, the mysteries of birthing and breastfeeding. The wet nurse was usually a woman who had lost a child and by prolonging lactation nursed another woman’s living child as replacement with the milk intended for her own child now resident in the otherworld. Hecate, therefore, has close affiliation with the lower world, and typically, one of the destinations offered where three roads meet is down. A dog, with its connotations of the wolf, was sacrificed to her at the crossroads. It was an animal that wasn’t eaten, but simply left to rot.
Hecate expresses the three states of the female and her riddle of identity.
In Greek mythology, Hecate presided over the reunion of the goddess Demeter (Roman Ceres) and her daughter Persephone. Hades had abducted the daughter into the netherworld. Hecate accompanied Persephone on her cyclical return to her mother as a visitor to the empyrean.
Typically, women reunited as a holy sisterhood for ritual enactments, grouping themselves generically as maidens, mothers, and crones. Such a triple bonding characterized the plant-gathering rituals of the bacchants. The male spiritual attendant in the service of the goddess was usually triple to match the trinity of the goddess. In Christianity, this motif is represented in the three persons of the godhead and their relationship to the Blessed Virgin and to the female Church who is the Lord’s spouse.
These triple sisterhoods abound in Classical myth. The three fates were sometimes portrayed as a version of Hecate. In the Perseus myth, three Grey Ladies, the Graeae, guarded the final entrance into the Gorgon Medusa’s cave. The visionary or shamanic motif of the passage into the cave was indicated by the single disembodied eye that they all three shared. Perseus passed through invisible, as the eye was in transit among them.
A similar trinity was the triple sisterhood of Graces, who attended the goddess Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, the goddess of love. Antonio Canova depicted them as three females so amorously involved with each other’s beauty that they seem to deny access to a man.
The best narrative of the female’s access to this awesome power of the triple goddess is Euripides’ Hecuba tragedy. Hecuba is named Hekabe in Greek. Hecuba was recognized in antiquity as Bendis, a Thracian version of Hecate. Hecate was called Hekate in Greek. It is often said that the heroines in Greek mythology are versions of a goddess.
Hekate—Hecate—and Hekabe—Hecuba—are the same name. Bendis was worshipped in the phases of the moon as a version of Artemis and presided over the virginal sisterhood of the hunt. Although a virgin, Artemis was also a midwife and a wet nurse, and she was invoked as an aid for the psychological and physiological distress of menstruation.
The mythologized history of Troy made Hecuba into the queen of the city, the wife of King Priam. She supposedly bore him fifty children. The joy of motherhood is multiplied in the plurality of the offspring. The more children lost, however, the greater is the grief. The joyous mother becomes the Lady of Sorrows.
After the fall of Troy, the old queen was rounded up with the other women of Troy to be shipped off to Greece as captive slaves. Hecuba has already lost most of her children in the destruction of her city, but she still has two daughters and two sons remaining. Two of these surviving children are twins, both of them prophets or shamans, Cassandra and her brother Helenus. Hecuba had sent the other son, Polydorus, to a supposed ally to keep him safe. The daughters can expect only to be used as concubines of their victorious Greek masters. The same fate awaits the other captive women. Those too old for sex will perform other menial tasks. Helenus, who is the only one who will eventually survive, had actually turned against the Trojans and revealed the magical secrets about how the city could be destroyed.
Hecuba was rounded up with the other women of Troy to be shipped off to Greece as captive slaves.
The play begins with the ghost of Polydorus narrating that his supposed host Polymestor has murdered him to steal his secret horde of Trojan gold and that the Greeks intend to sacrifice his sister Polyxena as an offering to the tomb of Achilles in order to rouse a wind for the return home. Meanwhile Hecuba, offstage inside her tent, is having a nightmare that is a symbolic version of the same revelation about her daughter’s sacrifice. She comes out of the tent crawling in terror. As the action proceeds, she begs Odysseus to intervene, since she once saved his life when he was found inside the city. He argues legalistically that he does indeed owe her a favor, but not her daughter. Hecuba curses such legalese and begs her daughter to supplicate Odysseus directly, but he pulls aside, and Polyxena disdains to beg for her life.
Hecuba is no longer a mother, but a crone, and she falls to the ground, groveling in the dust.
This gesture of supplication is a formal ritual that would bind the person petitioned to grant the petitioner’s supplication. The petitioner abjectly embraced the other person around the knees and reached an arm up to touch the chin. Hecuba pleads to be sacrificed instead, or even with her daughter, but Odysseus bluntly says that the tomb doesn’t want an old woman. She is no longer a mother, but a crone, and she falls to the ground, groveling in the dust.
After the sacrifice, the corpse of Polyxena is brought on stage, and the captive women, who have gone to the shore for water to wash the body to prepare it for burial, return with the corpse of the murdered son, which had washed ashore. With two dead children now visually present on stage, Hecuba plots revenge. She is the crone who mothered dead children.
She needs time before the Greeks set sail. The same actor who had played Odysseus now enters as Agamemnon. The doubling of roles is thematically significant. It is an indication of what the playwright intended as the structural meaning of the play. It was also something noted by the audience since a prize was awarded for the best actor, which means that the audience followed the actor through the succession of roles he impersonated. Odysseus had repulsed the gesture of ritual supplication, which would have bound him to return a favor, but now as Agamemnon the same actor begs Hecuba to ask what favor she seems to want. She just wants time before they set sail, but she tells him that if he helps her, her daughter Cassandra will be grateful and return the favor by greater sexual compliance in his bed as his concubine. This is extraordinarily amoral for the mother to use her daughter’s rape as a ploy for her own empowerment. She is essentially acting as a pimp for her own daughter.
The revenge is enacted in the same tent where Hecuba had her nightmare at the play’s beginning, but this time it is she who orchestrates the terrifying vision. Again, the structural balance is an indication of the playwright’s intention. The tent is the Cave of Dreams, or more explicitly, nightmares.
The mother uses her daughter’s rape as a ploy for her own empowerment.
The same actor in succession impersonates the roles of Polydorus—the son, Polyxena—the daughter, and Polymestor—the host who perverted hospitality by murdering his guest. It takes little imagination to notice that the three names are very similar. Polydorus is named for the ‘great gift’ of the horde of gold that his host has stolen. Polyxena is named as the ‘great hostess’ who was given as a gift to the tomb of Achilles. The sacrifice upon Achilles’ tomb was a ritual of sexual abduction into the hospitality of the netherworld. Polymestor is named as the ‘great advisor.’ He is Hecuba’s son-in-law, the man who ritually abducted her daughter in the ceremony of matrimony. Hecuba is his mother-in-law, to whom she gave her oldest daughter as a bride.
Polymestor was supposed to have been the host for Hecuba’s now dead son. She now offers him similar hospitality. She invites him and his two sons—her grandsons—into the tent, enticing him with the promise of still more Trojan gold buried inside, the stolen gift of Polydorus. The tent is filled with captive women, women who have lost their children or are about to serve as unwilling sexual slaves. The nubile ones, the maidens, paw over Polymestor’s robes, admiring the fine texture of his wife’s weaving—Hecuba’s daughter, until he realizes that his robes have trapped him like a spider’s web. Meanwhile the women who were mothers have been cooing over the adorable two sons, handing them from one to another to move them to the other side of the tent until, with their father now captive in his wife’s web, the mothers murder the sons as the last thing that the father would ever see. The maidens then plunge their brooches into his eyes.
These females have inverted their generic roles of sexually abducted maidens and birthing mothers, inflicting their own pathetic roles upon their male enemy. The maidens rape the rapist. The mothers kill the rapist’s sons. Hecuba, who is too old for sex, assists in the rape of her prophetic daughter, who will be murdered by Agamemnon’s wife when they get back home.
Hecuba dances out of the tent in triumph, while this time it is Polymestor who crawls out to tell his nightmare. The two contrasting emergences from the tent are choreographic parallels, the structure intended by the playwright.
Hecuba is now in control, no longer the despised old woman, but revealed in all her terrible power. She, who had condemned the legalistic argument of Odysseus, now delivers a full legal justification for her revenge. Polymestor can retaliate only by foretelling Hecuba’s fate. She will never reach Greece, but will fall from the mast of the ship at a place called ‘dog’s tomb,’ plunging down into the netherworld to become a bitch among the goddesses known as the Furies.
Orestes Pursued by the Furies by John Singer Sargent
We might well ask what she was doing climbing the mast of the ship. The ship’s mast is metaphoric for the axis between realms. These Furies hound with madness whoever perverts the rights of motherhood. The last view Polymestor had before he lost his eyesight was of the females, united as a sisterhood and laying claim to their usurped matriarchal powers. It is this terrifying or stunning vision that has made him clairvoyant.
The ecstatic reversal of the creator of the universe to its destroyer is represented in the Hindu pantheon as the great goddess Kali. Hecuba, however, presents a more structured multi-dimensional configuration, since Kali simply whirls in one direction for a period of ages and then reverses direction to undo what she created.
Hecuba is the paradigm of the heroine who traverses the image reflected in the doorway to access the power of her totality as a female, approaching Hecate’s crossroad from three directions, or passing through the reflection onto the branching roads to join her other two groups of sisters. Medea and Clytemnestra similarly access this awesome power, knowingly and with full intention. These are the decadent versions of the heroine’s story, although the term would be better phrased descendent, since there is nothing morally decadent about such triumphs.
Thetis begs a favor of Zeusin gesture of supplication by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
In general, the other great heroines of the tragic stage try to deflect their potential for this power, but stumble upon it inadvertently. Both wives of Hercules, for example, have such experiences. Dejanira—Deianira—in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis cannot believe the tales of the great queen Omphalë who was so dominant that she and the hero exchanged roles and clothing. Yet she sends the returning hero her robe anointed with a love potion, without realizing that the toxin came from the centaur that he killed on their nuptial journey and that a love potion binds the lover to the other’s will.
Hercules’ other wife, Megara of Thebes, in Euripides’ Herakles is unaware that she is named as the ‘Tomb Chamber’ and she inadvertently sets in motion the recycling of the heroic toxins that will end in Heracles’ placement in his tomb. The actor who had played Megara, in fact, comes back in the role of Theseus to make arrangements for the burial. Between those two roles, the same actor impersonates the goddess of the wolf-madness called rabies, recycling back to Hercules the toxins that he had mastered in his ascendant version of heroism.
In these descendent versions of the heroine, she returns to the bonding with the triple sisterhood and its awesome power. There is also another way of telling the story. In this other version, the female is separated from her sisters and achieves ascendancy to the empyrean by reintegration with her devastatingly stunning beauty.
This is the tale of Eros and Psyche. Eros is the god of Love, the son of Aphrodite. Psyche means the ‘Breath of Soul.’ The tale is extant in the Latin novel of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, but it had Greek antecedents, now lost. The Latin version calls Aphrodite, Venus, and her son, Cupid. As an episode in a novel, it has undergone elaborations, like the multiple sources of Gilgamesh, which obscure some aspects of the archetypal pattern. Psyche and Eros, however, were already a tale, with religious implications, a full half millennium before they surfaced in The Golden Ass. As early as the late archaic period Psyche was depicted with butterfly wings, and that portrayal became a commonplace in Hellenistic art.
Psyche as Nature’s Mirror by Paul Thurman.
In addition to meaning the ‘inspiring breath of soul,’ psyche is also the common word in ancient Greek for ‘butterfly.’ As the inspiring breath that animates life, psyche is obviously the inverse version of the stunning beauty that lurks beneath the monstrous iconography that portrays the Gorgon Medusa with her power to render the male inanimate and inseparable from her as her stone phallic pillar.
Psyche means both “inspiring breath of soul” and “butterfly,” the inverse of the stunning beauty lurking behind the Gorgon Medusa.
The psyche butterfly is emblematic of the metamorphosis of the voraciously eating caterpillar, creeping upon the plants that are its food, into the beautiful flying creature that no longer even has a mouth, and whose sole organ is reproductive. For the transformation, the caterpillar enters the chrysalis stage, secreting an exoskeleton as its cocoon. The creature inside is a pupa or little person, a ‘doll,’ and called the chrysalis because of its ‘golden’ color. When it emerges from the cocoon, an action called eclosion, the little doll bursts from the shell of its private cave enclosure, transformed into the beautiful butterfly. Both the botanical diet of the caterpillar and the pupa doll suggest the motif of visionary experience, since the pupil of the eye is so named as the little ‘doll’ seen reflected in its tiny mirror. The reflection, of course, is the minuscule image of the person outside gazing in through the watery membrane as the gateway to the other’s soul.
The butterfly’s sole function is the sexual union with another. Butterflies, however, are not promiscuous. They are monogamous. The male caps the reproductive system of its mate, sealing it with a sphragis or vaginal plug after insemination. It also secretes a pheromone that repels other suitors. This scenario was observed in antiquity and Aristotle described it.
The butterfly’s sole function is the sexual union with another.
Psyche was so beautiful that people were beginning to call her another Aphrodite. The goddess grew jealous and commanded her son Eros to prick her with his poisoned arrow so that when she awoke from her sleep she would fall in love with whatever creature she first saw. Aphrodite intended this to be some hideous beast like the goat-man Pan. Shakespeare used this motif in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the fairy queen Titania falls hopelessly in love with the ass-headed Bottom because of a magical herb. Both the ass and bottom imply the same obscenity.
Psyche, however, awoke unexpectedly and startled Eros. She looked right through him, but he was invisible. He pricked himself instead, falling madly in love with her. Aphrodite then put a curse on Psyche so that no one would ever want her. Disconsolate, Eros refused to continue his mission of spreading love around the world. Psyche was his one and only love.
Although Psyche is still beautiful, no one would take her for a wife. There was some kind of uncanny smell about her. An oracle informed her parents that they must abandon her on the nearby mountain. The wind abducted her to a paradisiacal valley with a magnificent palace, where invisible servants attended her. When night came, Eros consummated the marriage in the darkness, but he told her that she must never light a lamp to look upon him. They continued for some time in this manner of invisible love.
Psyche became pregnant and was allowed to visit her two sisters. They were jealous of her bliss and convinced her that her lover was some monstrous serpent that would devour her and the child. That was the reason that he kept his appearance secret. He was a beast. They tell her to look at him when he is asleep and slay him. After sex one night, when Eros had fallen asleep, Psyche lit a lamp, prepared to plunge a dagger into him, but she found him ravishingly beautiful when she saw him; and accidentally she pricked herself with one of his arrows, falling so madly in love that she started to kiss him. Accidentally, a drop of burning oil fell on him and awakened him. He flew away.
Psyche then sought revenge on her sisters. She visited each and told them what had happened, convincing them that it was one of them whom Eros truly loved. Each went to the mountain to offer herself to her lover by jumping naively off a cliff to her death. This jumping into the wind to one’s death is a mythical motif and implies the gathering of botanical pharmaceuticals as the agent for the rapture to the otherworld. The classic account occurs in Plato’s Phaedrus: the maiden Orithyia—Oreithyia—was abducted by the wind from her sisters while gathering pharmaceutical herbs. Here it is humorous to imagine the jealous sisters stupidly throwing themselves off a cliff to what they expect will be a paradise with their lover. Thematically, however, it is significant that Psyche was first separated from her sisters and now is being divested of her sisterhood.
Psyche then went in search of Eros. Both Demeter—Ceres—and Hera—Juno—refused to help and directed her to Aphrodite. The goddess imposed a series of tasks. These are the equivalent of the heroic labors of the male hero and involve the motif of the metaphoric entheogen that was the object of the quest.
Unlike male heroes who conquer nature, Psyche performs impossible tasks by cooperating with Nature, which performs the tasks for her.
Unlike the male hero, however, who conquers some force of nature, Psyche performs the impossible tasks by letting nature perform them for her. For example, she manages to sort a huge pile of seeds by letting ants do it for her. She gathers bits of Golden Fleece from a herd of vicious rams following the advice of a river to wait until they rest in the noonday sun and pick whatever has stuck to the branches and bark of the trees. The advice obviously involves the motif of the Golden Ram as a botanical metaphor, and was probably recognized as such by the novel’s original audience. Next, with the help of an eagle, she fetches water flowing from a cleft, impossible to reach and guarded by serpents. None of these count, as far as Aphrodite is concerned, since she didn’t do them by herself.
The fourth task was to enter the netherworld and bring back from Persephone a box with stunning beauty in it, to restore the harm that Psyche has caused to the divine appearance of the goddess. Psyche, however, opened the box from curiosity, but saw no beauty in it, only infernal sleep—narcosis. Eros found her, woke her, and put the sleep back in its box. Then they petitioned the gods to allow them to marry. Psyche was given a drink of ambrosia, making her immortal and a permanent resident in the empyreal realm.
Psyche gave birth to a daughter named Voluptas—Greek Hedonë. The words are cognate with ‘voluptuous’ and ‘hedonism.’ The tale heralds the dawn of a new sexuality, replacing the promiscuous physical coupling of Aphrodite and her lovers with the emotional bond of love.
Psyche revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova
One can note the transition from the sisterhood to the single female, the duality of the lover as bestial or beautiful, and the acceptance of female sexual pleasure. The theme of visibility or invisibility encodes the mystery of the spirit’s consent to reside in flesh. Psyche’s beauty, moreover, is superior to that of her mother-in-law, in that she has donned the beauty of Death from the narcotic box of Persephone. Aphrodite’s relation to death comes only through her union with Ares (Mars), the god of war, the probable father of Eros. The slaughter of battle thematically involves the rape of the captive women. This is not love between equals, but pure sexual exploitation.
A terra cotta votive plaque from southern Italy contrasts the two ages of sexuality. The chariot of Aphrodite with Hermes represents the erotic physicality of the sex goddess and her stone pillar. Their child will be the Hermaphrodite, who we have seen was responsible for the loveless hypersexuality of nymphomania and satyriasis. Eros and Psyche pull the chariot, holding the cock of Persephone and the unguent vial retrieved from the realm of death. The plaque comes from a cave sanctuary of Persephone at Locri, where the netherworld goddess was seen as the patroness of marriage. Since the depiction is a votive plaque, it encodes some mystery. Thousands of these plaques were carefully buried in the sanctuary. The numerous depictions of Psyche tormented by the flaming torches of Eros elevate the simple fairytale to the rank of theology, implying the yearning of the soul to embrace the flesh, redeemed with its beloved to the empyreal realm through a drink of the divine elixir.
This divine elixir, infused with and derived from the entheogen, thus permeates the entire mythos with which Western civilization is familiar – whether expressed through the triple nature of the heroine or the dual nature of the hero.