Mother bears are ferociously protective and extraordinarily nurturing. Good advice to people headed into the wilderness is never to get between a mother bear and her cubs! Mother bears have qualities that make them really good mothers. They are notably fierce in defense of their young; they are also good caretakers. Bear cubs are born in the winter months—usually in January and February, while the mother bear is in hibernation. Newborn bears are smaller than newborn human babies, weighing around ten ounces at birth. They can't open their eyes and are kept warm in their mother's fur and by her breath. They suckle instinctively and grow rapidly on the fat-rich milk, emerging only in early spring when they are big enough and strong enough to walk, run, and explore.
A mother bear sleeps only when her babies sleep. Initially, the cubs nurse every ten minutes. They are noisy, make humming noises when awake and suckling, and cry when they need something. The mother bear washes them often with her tongue, and puts them on a teat when they can't find one. Once the cubs leave the den, the mother will continue to suckle them until they are weaned. She then teaches them what berries they can eat, how to catch fish, and how to hunt. The cubs learn to climb trees for safety when there may be danger on the ground. They have little to fear when they are in their mother's sight—the biggest exception being the dangers posed by bad actors of their own species. Predatory male bears eat cubs.
When the cubs are able to take care of themselves, the mother bear makes them independent of her. She sends them up a tree, just as when she was teaching them to climb to safety, only this last time, she doesn't come back for them. They are old enough to be self-sufficient; now they must climb down and fend for themselves.
I am reminded here of a woman who described how she took animal mothers as role models for herself. On becoming pregnant, fearful that her own mother's unmaternal example may have rubbed off on her, she did the opposite and turned to the example of animal mothers—and particularly mother bears. I might add here that her own mother's behavior may have been caused by male “experts” on child-rearing who told young mothers to put babies on feeding schedules, to toilet train them early, and not to spoil them by giving in to their crying. This was also a time when it seemed that only foreigners and the poor nursed their children; middle- and upper-class women did not.
According to these “experts,” to be a competent modern mother was a matter of having a stronger will than the baby's. To comfort a fussy baby or to nurse on demand was frowned upon. This deprived both mother and child. The effect on young mothers was to suppress their bodies (drying up the milk) and to suppress the maternal instinct to respond to a crying baby. By doing what they were told, young mothers missed learning that they could instinctively distinguish levels of distress in their children, and could help and be comforting. Instead, a whole generation of American mothers got further lessons in hierarchy: Do what others tell you to do; believe what others say rather than what you feel yourself.
The pendulum eventually swung away from the “show the child who is boss” school of parenting to more permissive parenting, in which nothing must diminish the self-esteem of the child. In this version, a good mother and an indulgent one tended to become one and the same. While you can't spoil an infant by always responding to its distress or by providing whatever it needs, doing so long after infancy does spoil character. Shielding children from disappointments, not teaching them limits and limitations, and excessively praising them for every little thing prolongs childhood and isn't good preparation for responsible adolescence or adulthood. Time to call upon mother bear as a role model!
The bear is a symbol of the protective aspect of Artemis. Artemis is particularly protective of girls and women. She is characterized as a virgin goddess and never as a mother. Yet she is the goddess to whom young pre-pubescent girls were dedicated; they were then referred to as the arktoi or “little bears.” During the year that young girls were sanctified under Artemis' protection, they were safe from early marriage and had the freedom from women's constrictions in dress and behavior. They could play as boys did and were free to be outdoors—very much like nine- to twelve-year-old “tomboys.”
I look back on summers at Girl Scout Camp and realize that these were artktoi experiences for me. The camp drew children from the Los Angeles area, busing us up to Big Bear Lake—to terrain dear to the goddess Artemis—where there were meadows, forests, mountains, lakes, and streams. We learned how to make campfires, use a compass, tie knots, carve with a knife, and recognize star constellations, trees, and various flora and fauna. We hiked a lot, sang together around the campfire and while hiking, slept under the stars, showered sometimes, wore wrinkled nondescript clothes (except for the “greenie tops” that had a somewhat uniform look), and stowed our stuff away in a shared tent in case of rain. We were from many parts of the city and surrounding areas. At camp, we did not have to live up to any image we had at school; we didn't spend time concerned about our reflections in mirrors or in how boys saw us. We learned about ourselves and each other, and shared confidences. While our parents sent us away to camp the first time, we returned there by choice. It was meaningful and fun because we had the Artemis archetype in common—the archetype of sister. When this is an active archetype in a girl or woman, she has a sense of sisterhood and an affinity to feminist causes.
Artemis is twin sister to Apollo. While Apollo is God of the Sun, with his golden bow and arrows, Artemis is Goddess of the Moon, with her bow and arrows of silver. She is also called Artemis Eileithyria and is the goddess of childbirth and the divine midwife, because she helped her mother, Leto, through the longest and most difficult labor in mythology. Leto was impregnated by Zeus, the chief god in Greek mythology, and bore the twins, Artemis and Apollo. Because Zeus' wife, Hera, was angered by the pregnancy, no one dared offer Leto shelter or aid.
Artemis is born first. After her delivery, Hera causes Leto to suffer and go into prolonged labor. But divinities are not like mortals, and newborn Artemis becomes her mother's midwife, helping to deliver Apollo. Consequently, in ancient Greece, women prayed to Artemis for swift delivery from the pain of childbirth. Contemporary midwives and women who choose obstetrics and gynecology as medical specialties to help women and reduce their fear and pain in childbirth are thus being true to this aspect of Artemis.
Artemis is the only goddess who often came to the rescue of women in other circumstances. She saves Arethusa from being raped; she protects or avenges her mother's honor when a giant tries to rape her and when a mortal woman demeans her. In these stories, Artemis is fierce in her protectiveness, like a mother bear. Or like activists who rescue trafficked girls from brothels and provide gynecological and psychological care to rape victims. Or like those who lead demonstrations to seek justice for raped girls and women in India, or lobby the United States Congress to pass the Violence Against Women Act, or advocate for a United Nations World Conference on Women. Or like anyone, in fact, who works toward equality for women and the protection of mothers and children.
Girls raised metaphorically by mother bear can be children nurtured by Mother Nature. They may be drawn to animals and find solace outdoors. They may feel safer and more at home under a tree or currying horses in a stable than in a home where they may be neglected or abused. When these girls find mother bear in themselves and find the support to be themselves in the archetype symbolized by the protective mother bear, they become competitors in the world. It is the archetype of Artemis that comes to the aid of these girls who, in some significant way, were abandoned and then found in nature or with animals the parents that they did not have at home. It may also be their nature as an Artemis to prefer to be in the woods, uninterested in staying at home or in doing womanly or girlish things.
I have known many women in my psychiatric and analytic practice and in my life who, like Atalanta, were psychologically abandoned and then raised by “mother bear.” As girls, they came from families where parental figures neglected, rejected, or abused them emotionally or physically, or where parents, because of illness, death, or circumstance, could not be fully present. As a result, at a psychological and spiritual level, they had to raise themselves. They also instinctively kept up appearances, worked at making good grades or excelling at sports, and acted as if their home lives were normal. It is natural for their Artemis nature to follow examples we see in nature. Nature provides animals with protective coloration so they don't stand out. When animals are wounded or weakened, they know to hide their vulnerability to avoid becoming prey.
Gloria Steinem wrote of herself: “I remembered feeling sad about navigating life by myself, working after school, worrying about my mother, who was sometimes too removed from reality to know where she was, or who I was, and concealing these shameful family secrets from my friends . . . now as then, I turn away sympathy with jokes and a survivor's pride” (Revolution From Within, 1992). Artemis is the archetype that protects the young girl who instinctively hides her vulnerability during the years of middle school and high school.
Girls who are not under the protection of Artemis may reveal rather than hide vulnerability, which can mark them as potential victims to be preyed on, bullied, or made scapegoats. Recent media attention focused on two young girls, ages fifteen and seventeen, who hanged themselves. It's an old story: Girl has too much to drink at a party and passes out; boys take turns having sex with her; her name is passed around at school; then other boys want her to “put out” for them, too. She becomes known as a “slut” and is shunned by the “good” girls. A new variation on the theme makes it worse: While one of the young men is fucking her (what else can it be called?), there are “clicks” as another or others use their smartphones to take photos or videos that are posted online and circulated around the school. Eventually, and in despair, the two young girls killed themselves.
I mentioned hearing about these two teenage suicides at the Pacifica Writers Conference in Santa Barbara and learned from Donna DeNomme (Ophelia's Oracle, 2009) about an “Artemis girl” who did not accept being a victim and whose story had a very different ending. What she told me warmed my heart and was the best kind of encouragement, since, at the time, I was writing Artemis with the intention that it would help women to see themselves in this myth—younger women especially.
Donna described the situation in an email to me:
One less-than-popular girl was thrilled to be included by her girlfriend with an invitation to attend a party. At that party her delight turned to terror as she was raped. Her so-called girlfriend filmed the violation and uploaded the video to the Internet. When the victim arrived at school on Monday, she was taunted by classmates for what they may have thought was consensual sex. The traumatized girl, who had been given Ophelia's Oracle by her grandmother a few months before, said it was the story about the boldness of Artemis in the book that gave her the courage to press charges against the boy who raped her, the girl who filmed the rape, and the mother of one of the teens who bought beer for the kids and then left them alone in her house. She told her grandmother: “Artemis would want me to do this.”
When I wrote Goddesses in Everywoman, I provided exemplars of each of the goddess archetypes that were public figures. Gloria Steinem, as a founder of Ms. magazine and a beautiful spokesperson for feminism, was a natural choice for Artemis. Her concerns for girls and women, her competency and courage to stand for and stand up for equality and empowerment of women, are clearly those of the archetype. However, Gloria—like all women—is more than an embodiment of one archetype. While one archetype may be the strongest, all of the others are potential sources of meaning in every woman. And not every facet of the strongest archetype has to be lived out or felt in each woman. Gloria is like a mother bear in her protectiveness and in responding to appeals for help from women, but she is hardly noted for being a woman in the wilderness.
Julia Butterfly Hill, on the other hand, spent two years living in an ancient redwood tree exposed to the elements in order to prevent the logging of an old-growth forest in Northern California. She is a symbol of an environmental activist who embodies this aspect of the archetype.
While an activist becomes proactive in response to or in protest against something happening in the outer world, the goddess-of-the-moon aspect of the Atalanta archetype explains the capacity for reflection—to draw back from activity, to think about motivation and meaning, to see by moonlight or reflected light. In the wilderness, moonlight illuminates; there is beauty and mystery—a oneness I experienced as a Girl Scout in the wilderness that became the source of later understanding that I drew on in writing The Tao of Psychology (1999). Sleeping outdoors under the nighttime sky with the Milky Way overhead, paying close attention so that I might see a shooting star (probably a comet) to make a wish on—these experiences prepared the way for me to slip into an altered state of consciousness. They prepared me to recognize that I was part of everything out there. They brought me an inner certainty, even before I had words for or knew of the concept of oneness that underlies all visible manifestations. It was mystical insight, and so very Artemis.
To be able to take to the woods, to turn to animals or to books, to have a rich imagination, or to be nourished by solitude are solitary activities that feed self-sufficiency—a quality needed and strengthened in girls who have to raise themselves because of inadequate, absent, disabled, or abusive parents. Artemis can be alive in the inner lives of girls and women when there is no room for autonomy, education, or protest in the world they live in. In the inner world of the imagination, a girl can be heroic; she can have a place in her psyche that identifies with global expressions of feminism that are condemned or ridiculed. She has an archetypal connection with Artemis, even if she must remain obedient or subservient, and is forced to marry young. I suspect that this accounts for the women who demonstrated during the Arab Spring against dictatorship, surprising the world with the fact that they even existed.
In my years of medical training, as I observed newborn babies in the nursery, I realized that personality traits show up early. Some newborns are quiet and placid when they are picked up from the bassinette; others protest loudly when disturbed. Most seem to spend their time asleep, but others look around and stay awake more. There are fussy babies who cry a lot and others who rarely do. Levels of passivity and activity differ.
I was taught as a resident in psychiatry that babies are like a tabula raza (blank tablet) on which experience writes character and personality. This theory puts mothers at fault for everything, including sexual orientation and psychiatric illnesses. While pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's concept of the “goodenough mother” (Winnicott Studies, 1994) helped mitigate the impact of this theory and lessened the pressure on mothers, mothers were still held to be the responsible ones; fathers were neither praised nor blamed. The unique personality of the baby itself was hardly ever mentioned, much less emphasized. It took having two babies of my own to learn what mothers have known all along—that, far from being a blank slate upon which we write, babies come with predispositions and train their mothers. They push buttons in their mothers' psyches and draw out aspects and responses—for better or worse.
I also suspect that infant girls and toddlers who survive illnesses that were expected to kill them—or were abandoned shortly after birth and then are found alive, or who survived terrible physical assaults—have an inherent or archetypal will to live. They draw upon an indomitable spirit, a characteristic of Artemis that shows up early when it has to. One amazing true story of survival, found in The Girl with No Name (Chapman, et.al., 2013), tells of a five-year-old toddler who was probably kidnapped and then abandoned in the Colombian jungle. The child stayed on the periphery of a troop of Capuchin monkeys, eating what they ate. She was taken in by the monkeys and grew up feral and walking on all fours until she was found and maltreated by humans, which began another whole saga of survival. The child's birth name was never discovered; she now goes by the name Marina Chapman. Marina made me wonder if Atalanta could have been a real person about whom stories were told—a little girl who became a mythical figure, a girl thought to have been suckled by a bear and found by hunters.
Greek mythology, like Greek society, was patriarchal. Male gods were powerful and territorial. Their use of power to dominate or rule over others was taken for granted, and men made in their image assumed the same rights. In classical Greek mythology, rape was a common theme. Zeus, the chief god of Olympus, tricked, seduced, raped, impregnated, and abandoned the mothers of his many progeny.
Patriarchal systems are always hierarchal, symbolized as a pyramid or mountain, with the most desirable position at the top. Humans, animals, plants, the ocean, and minerals are all exploited and used for the profit and power of those at the top of the mountain. Conflicts and wars are fought over who will occupy the top of the pyramid, with destruction of life, beauty, and hope found in every war zone. Rape is used as a metaphor when applied to cities and to the earth itself; but wherever there is war, women are raped. Today, in the Congo, rape is deliberately used as a means of conducting war. Eve Ensler, returning from the Congo, refers to patriarchy as a “Rape Culture” (In the Body of the World, 2013). This made me think about how Zeus on Mount Olympus, the symbolic progenitor of patriarchy, was a serial rapist.
From archeological evidence, most notably that described by UCLA archeologist Marija Gimbutas (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1982), we know that. Europe's first civilization, from 6,500 to 5,000 BCE, was matrifocal, sedentary, and peaceful. Its members created art and worshipped goddesses. Successive waves of invaders from the distant north and east, referred to as Indo-Europeans or Kurgans, conquered these earlier peoples. The invaders were nomadic, horse-riding, warlike tribes who worshipped sky gods. They regarded themselves as superior to the peaceful and more culturally developed people of Old Europe, whom they easily subjugated. Male gods and male superiority came to be assumed as the natural order. In the historical time when Athens became known as the “cradle of democracy,” the right of citizenship was given only to men. Fathers had the power of life or death over their newborn children, which meant that an unwanted daughter or a defective infant could be disposed of, and a daughter who lost her virginity could be sold into slavery.
Not much has changed in some parts of the world. There are still places where a young daughter can be sold into marriage to a much older man who may already have several wives. The prospective husband and her father merely agree upon a dowry or bride price. Or a daughter may be sold for an agreed price to a human trafficker who takes her to a brothel. Her virginity must be assured in both instances, as her value depends upon it. Under this code, since a virgin who is raped dishonors the men of her family, a brother, a father, an uncle, or a grandfather has the right to murder her. This awful practice is called “honor killing.” Mothers have no say in the fate of their daughters or, for that matter, in their own fate, since their primary function is to be brood mares. How very different if, instead, these women were mother bears!
In “Sarah Palin, Mama Grizzlies, Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes,” Arianna Huffington looked to “that under-appreciated political pundit, Carl Jung” to explain Sarah Palin's appeal (Huffington Post, August 1, 2010). She cites “Mama Grizzlies,” Palin's web video compiled from a series of Palin rallies, with sound-bite responses.
“It seems like it's kind of a mom awakening . . . women are rising up.”
“I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody is coming to attack their cubs.”
Huffington notes that it is not Palin's political positions that people respond to; it's her use of symbols.
Mama grizzles rearing up to protect their young? That's straight out of Jung's “collective unconscious”—the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung's words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.”
When women in India take to the streets to protest official disregard of rape, when women dance in the streets in an outpouring of support for Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising demonstrations to stop violence against women and girls, when the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working toward empowerment and equality for women and girls grows exponentially, women across the world are rising up, led by feminists for whom Artemis and mother-bear activism are deep sources of meaning, even when these forces are not named. When they are, there is an immediate “aha!” of intuitive recognition, becauseecause these are archetypal energies that are found in many cultures.
When Atalanta is born, her father expresses his anger and his rejection in a horrible way. Today, the birth of a girl can still be a cause of disappointment, resentment, or anger. In China, for instance, under the “one child per family” policy, girl babies may literally be abandoned in railroad stations and other public places where they will be found and taken to a state-run orphanage. In rural areas, where infanticide is more common, newborn girls may be drowned, smothered, or starved, the family claiming that they died “in childbirth” or shortly after. The same is true in parts of India.
In a 2011 newspaper article, “Girls Choose Better Names” (San Francisco Chronicle, October 23), Chaya Babu reported from Mumbai that 285 girls shed names like Nakusa or Nakushi, which mean “unwanted” in Hindi, and chose new names for a fresh start in life. The plight of girls in India came into focus as this year's census showed the nation's ratio for children under the age of six had dropped to 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. Such ratios indicate a higher death rate among girls due to abortion of female fetuses, female infanticide, or neglect of female children.
Normally between 103 and 106 boys are born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been stable enough to indicate a natural order across races and cultures, one that resulted in approximately the same number of young men and young women, taking into account that, genetically, males are slightly more vulnerable and slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. The change in this natural order was dramatically illustrated on the cover of The Economist (March 6–12, 2010), which carried the word “Gendercide” printed in bright pink on a black background. Under this startling headline was the question: “What Happened to 100 Million Baby Girls?” The serious article within concluded that these girls had either been killed, aborted, or neglected to the point that they died. When girl babies are not valued and prenatal sex-determination is linked with declining fertility as well as the selective abortion of female fetuses, a disproportionate number of male children survive, skewing the ratio of boys to girls. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by 2020 there will be thirty to forty million more young men than young women in China because of the preference for boys. In India in 2001, there were forty-six districts with a sex ratio of over 125 boys to 100 girls.
It is not just a skewed birth rate that is reflected in there being fewer females in the world. There are also fewer girls and fewer women surviving than can be expected. Girls don't get the same healthcare and food as boys in impoverished countries. In India, girls from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die from preventable causes than boys their age. Women die unnecessarily in childbirth due to inadequate medical care, or due to lack of contraception and choice. Pregnancy carries greater risks when the mother is very young or weakened by multiple pregnancies and poor nutrition. Then there are deaths of women from the collateral damage of armed conflict, especially when rape is used as a weapon, which is the case in many parts of Africa. And rape becomes an even more common and horrifying gender hazard when accompanied by mutilation and severe beatings, as it is in families and communities where the victim is blamed and may be turned out to live on the streets.
Experts have revised upward the estimate of missing girls from 100 million to 160 million. Jeni Klugman, Director of Gender and Development for the World Bank, called this “femicide” in a talk at the United Nations that drew from the World Development Report for 2012. According to this report, four million women go missing annually. These are obviously conclusions drawn from inadequate information, in the realm of what laymen call “guesstimates,” or “educated guesses.” But questioning numbers like these or doubting their accuracy sometimes allows us to ignore their human impact. When we turn people into inanimate statistics, we numb our emotional reaction to them. When we try to wrap our minds around such appalling numbers, we lose sight of their real meaning. One remedy is to think in smaller numbers. What if it were only a “mere” million, or only 100,000, or just 10,000? What if it were your daughter or yourself or your very young grandchild? It is important to be able to imagine being helpless, to imagine the horror of being abducted, beaten, and raped, or of being sold or turned by fear and pain into prostitution, as occurs in human trafficking.
When I go to panels and presentations that are given by UN NGOs (nongovernmental organizations recognized by the United Nations) or by the UN Commission on the Status of Women, they usually focus on women and girls during the meetings. At these events, women from every continent come together to address women's issues. Many of these organizations were founded by women who themselves had been victimized, but did not take on the role of victim. For others, this work feels like a vocation—a calling to help women who suffer in a number of ways, among them human trafficking, AIDS, or female genital mutilation (FMG). This barbaric, religiously sanctioned practice of cutting off a girl's clitoris and labia and sometimes sewing what remains together (except for space for menstrual blood to flow out) is intended as a way to prove the virginity of the girl or woman when taken in marriage, perhaps as one of many wives. This mutilation, of course, also assures that first penetration must tear through scar tissue, that intercourse can never be pleasurable, and that childbirth will be painful. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and feminist (or, her preference, “womanist”) Alice Walker has galvanized public opinion against FMG through her writingand film collaboration with Pratibha Parmar on Warrior Marks (1993). When Walker was interviewed, she confronted her critics with this ringing statement: “Torture is not culture!” repudiating the right to do this to little girls in the name of religion and culture.
In one version of Atalanta's myth, hunters who think they are rescuing her kill the mother bear. In another version (preferred by readers who feel a connection with bears and Atalanta), the hunters come upon Atalanta when she is alone in the bear's cave and take her back to their camp. In both versions, Atalanta is, for a time, raised by men, from whom she learns language and proficiency with bow and arrows and spear. She no doubt gets approval and encouragement from these men, taking to everything they teach. Atalanta would have felt special, cared for, and supported during this phase of her life, as do girls in the mold of Artemis who have fathers who are delighted with their spunk and abilities.
It is easy to think of Atalanta as a high-spirited, confident girl who, small as she is, stands toe to toe with these hunters, insisting on what she thinks is true and protesting when something is not fair. Men like these take pride in such daughters. They are “Daddy's best buddy” or “Daddy's little girl.” This kind of relationship often comes to an end as puberty approaches and it's time to establish physical and emotional distance from the budding woman the daughter is becoming. This transition may go smoothly or may be tempestuous and fraught with emotional outbursts. A best-buddy phase with a father who is admired and a good role model supports give-and-take, encourages assertiveness, and recognizes developing skills. These young women tend to become like their fathers or father figures in certain ways that give them a sense of pride, because their fathers are proud of them.
In The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), Katniss Everdeen is sixteen when the trilogy begins. The happiest time in the week for her is when she goes with her father into the woods, lakes, and meadows outside the District-12 fence, beyond which citizens are forbidden to go. There, he teaches her to hunt with a bow and arrow, to bring down food for the family, and to hunt game to trade. Katniss has both instinct and skill; her arrows fly where she sends them. After her father's death, Katniss becomes the sole provider for her mother and sister. Her mother withdraws into her grief and stops functioning, and it is up to Katniss to look after the family.
Both Atalanta and Katniss excel as hunters, taught by their fathers or father figures to be competent and survive on their own. Katniss clearly identifies with her father and takes over as provider and protector as much as she can at his death. Her mother is clearly not a role model. In fact, both Atalanta's and Katniss' mothers are ineffectual. And, although Atalanta's father rejects her and orders her exposed on a mountaintop to die, in psychological terms, both are “fathers' daughters.” They are women who are decisive, can act swiftly, choose targets or goals of their own, and have the focus and skill to hit what they aim for. Their worlds are outside the household that is the realm of “mothers' daughters.”
In the United States toward the end of the 1960s and 1970s, consciousness-raising groups became the foundation of the Women's Movement. Here, women learned about sexism and inequality. They became determined that this had to change, and they encouraged each other to make a difference. Women shared information, wrote, marched, testified, had demonstrations, and entered formerly all-male enclaves and professions. Ms. magazine began publication. Couples worked to create egalitarian relationships and families. As a result, girls with Artemis qualities circa 1970 and after were likely to have parental approval to be active and confident. Spirited three-year-old girls with minds of their own could express what they wanted and felt, and still bask in the approval of their fathers and mothers. No more Little Miss Muffetts sitting on tuffets eating her curds and whey. Now, far from being frightened away by the spider, these emanicipated girls could be free to investigate and explore all the critters and creatures in the outdoors with interest. Indeed, little Ms. Muffett was “free to be you and me,” and sang the songs to prove it!
Helen Stoltzfus, author of and principal performer in the award-winning documentary film Send Word, Bear Mother (www.theoi.com), based her work on her own true story, a saga that began with her illness and infertility. She had seen many specialists without success over many years. With symptoms of fatigue and infertility, and no satisfactory explanations for either, Helen joined a support group for people with life-threatening and chronic illnesses. In an exercise in which she was supposed to tap into inner sources of healing and imagination, a skeptical Helen unexpectedly began having a series of profound encounters with a mother grizzly bear spirit who appeared to her in dreams and came to her unbidden in fantasy. She experienced these as powerful visitations from the spirit world. They empowered her to try one more specialist in her effort to get pregnant.
This doctor diagnosed Helen as having endometriosis—a condition in which cells that are part of the lining of the uterus that are normally shed during menstruation can grow anywhere in the peritoneum (the space that holds all our internal organs below the diaphragm)—and recommended surgery. Helen had the surgery, but there seemed to be no satisfactory explanation for her condition. So she began to search for possible causes. She learned that environmental toxins, dioxins in particular, had been linked to endometriosis. Meanwhile, the mother grizzly bear visitations continued. This prodded her to learn all she could about bears, including that bears are threatened by the same toxins as humans.
The bear-mother spirit persisted relentlessly in Helen's psyche, calling her to go to Alaska where the bears live. As soon after her surgery as she could, she heeded the call and went to Denali National Park by herself. She did not feel well. The effects of chronic fatigue and the operation had sapped her energy, and travel took even more out of her. She went, like sick people going to Lourdes, with the hope of being healed. Immediately upon entering the park, a mother grizzly with two cubs walked across the road in front of the tour bus. (In Denali, tourists are driven on buses through the park, while bears roam freely.) This was like a powerful waking dream to Helen. The real and the symbolic came together. While Helen may have appeared to be just another tourist, for her this was truly a pilgrimage.
No logical or practical decision brought Helen to Alaska, but rather a persistent and compelling message to come. The mother-bear symbol showed up over and over—not just in dreams and thoughts, but also in outer experiences. Helen encountered bear images in various art forms and in references in conversations. Suddenly, the idea or symbol of bear seemed to be everywhere. The urge or compelling desire to see real bears in their natural setting grew and set her on course for Denali. Only after going to Alaska did she come to understand the connection between what toxins had done to her body and the similar dangers they held for bears—as well as the larger implication of the danger to the wilderness and to Mother Nature herself.
The spirit of the bear gave an urgency to Helen's desire to do something with her new knowledge. She found her means of expression in her work. She wrote and staged a one-woman performance piece that became the basis for the film Send Word, Bear Mother, in which she played the principal role. Through this film and in the work that came from her inner/outer journey, Helen became an activist with a personal mission to foster an awareness of the connection between toxins, infertility, and the danger of the disappearing wilderness. And what's more, she became pregnant one month after she came back from Denali. Nine months later, her daughter, Lydia, was born.
“Send Word, Bear Mother” was Helen's personal healing chant, one that she adapted from a Sioux chant.
Send word, bear mother
Send word, bear mother
I'm having a hard time
Send word, bear mother
Send word, bear mother
I'm having a bad time.
Helen's encounters with the mother-bear spirit had a she-who-must-be-obeyed energy about them that persisted until she heeded the message, went to Alaska, and saw real bear mothers. The bear had a grip on her imagination. The chant was a plea for help to the bear-mother spirit—for healing.
Christine is another woman who had a profound encounter with mother bear, who came to her in a dream. In this dream, her arm was held in the jaws of a powerful mother bear who would not let go. She could neither shake the bear off nor get help from men in the dream. Then she came to a large, familiar statue of a mother bear with two cubs that she had often seen at the University of California Medical Center. In her dream, when she placed her hands on the statue, the bear finally let go of her arm.
As we talked about her dream, Christine intuitively connected her recent obsession about having a baby with the mother bear. She kept noticing pregnant women and women with babies; intrusive thoughts about becoming pregnant herself came into her mind and were followed by anxiety. She wanted and feared this. She had her course set on becoming a psychologist. She had only a year left to finish the academic preparation, after which she wanted to begin a practice. Now the idea of having a baby intruded and she felt that, if she gave in to it, it would mean sacrificing her career. When we explored what putting her hands on the statue of the mother bear could mean, she had a strong sense that, by doing so, she was making a promise. With the promise made, the bear could let her go.
After this discussion with me, Christine went home and told her husband about the dream and its meaning to her. In their talk, they decided that, once she finished her last year of school, their goal would be for her to become pregnant. They would share childcare responsibilities and support each other's work. With Christine's husband backing up her promise to mother bear, her intrusive, obsessive thoughts went away. The mother bear let go the grip she had on Christine's psyche once she felt an inner certainty that she would honor the mother bear in herself.
“Undressing the Bear” is a chapter in Terry Tempest Williams' An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (1995). In it, Williams tells bear stories, relates dreams of bears, and shares anecdotes that point to a connection between women and bears. She writes:
We are creatures of paradox, women and bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable, hence our mystery. Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the impulses we arouse and the forces we represent.
Among the stories in this particular chapter, there is a description of a bear dream from a bookseller friend of Terry's who tells of sharing it with a male customer:
“I dreamt I was in Yellowstone. A grizzly, upright, was walking toward me. Frightened at first, I began to pull away, when suddenly a mantle of calm came over me. I walked toward the bear and we embraced.” The man across the counter listened, and then said matter-of-factly, “Get over it.”
Terry mused: “Why? Why should we give up the dream of embracing the bear? For me, it has everything to do with undressing, exposing, and embracing the Feminine.” She explains:
I see the Feminine defined as a reconnection to the Self, a commitment to the wildness within—our instincts, our capacity to create and destroy; our hunger for connection as well as sovereignty, interdependence and independence, at once. We are taught not to trust our own experience.
It is interesting that the ferocious protective power of the bear is an attribute of Artemis and not of the Greek mother goddesses, who were powerless to protect themselves or their children from male predators and abusive partners. In fact, in Greek mythology and in the history of the Western civilization that owes so much to the Greeks, women have neither been empowered nor equal to men, however Olympian their social status. Gaia, the personification of earth who birthed all life on the planet, is abused by her husband, Uranus, after he grows increasingly resentful of her fertility. When he prevents anything further from being born, she is in great pain, until her son, Cronos, emasculates his father and consigns him to the deepest and darkest part of the underworld, replacing him as the chief god. Rhea, the mother of the Olympians, stands by helplessly as her husband, Cronos, fearing that he will have a son who will do to him what he did to his own father, swallows her first five children as soon as they are born. Finally, in her sixth pregnancy, Rhea wraps a stone in swaddling clothes and tricks him into believing he has swallowed Zeus, who grows to manhood and, with allies, overthrows his father. Demeter, the mother of Persephone, can not prevent her daughter's abduction and rape.
Good human mothers mirror their children, respond to their happy or sad emotions, and realize that their children's feelings matter. They see their individuality, their strengths, and their sensitivities. Between a healthy mother and child, there is a reciprocity and response that fosters the growth of emotional intelligence.
This is not what mother bears do. Girls in the mold of Atalanta are often very independent, but not very good at intimacy with friends or partners. The forging of emotional bonds becomes challenging to them and to those who love them. Intimacy grows through mirroring, reciprocity, empathy, compassion, and thoughtfulness. Atalanta the adult may be a woman who did not learn how to look after the feelings of others and who may not know her own emotional needs or feelings. She can not learn this from bear mother/Mother Nature or the Artemis archetype. This she can only learn from other human beings.