It is a common theme in Greek mythology that to offend a god or goddess has very serious consequences. In the myth of Atalanta, the offense was to Artemis, who is outraged when Meleager's father gives thanks and offers sacrifices to myriad gods and goddesses, including the country gods and all the gods of the Heavens, and leaves her out. Much of Calydon was a forested wilderness rich with wildlife—Artemis' favorite terrain. So, in retribution, she creates the huge boar of the myth and unleashes it to ravage the countryside.
When people believed that the world was inhabited by divinities, events beyond their control or understanding were seen as punishment brought on by some offense, usually to a male god. Zeus brought storms and lightning down on people; Poseidon unleashed earthquakes and huge waves as an expression of his anger. Hera usually directed her jealousy toward a particular woman, but once unleashed her destructive wrath on the whole island of Aegina. Attributing disasters to offended gods and goddesses was a means of making sense of otherwise irrational events. History and religion are full of examples in which sacrifices were made to appease an angry god, or punishment was meted out for bringing on drought, crop failure, economic recession, or plague.
Living with a Calydon boar remains vividly real in dysfunctional families in which a powerful adult can go out of control—a parent who erupts into rage or behaves as if possessed, becoming a different person when under the influence of an intoxicant, or in fear or anger. Male rage that results in domestic violence against wives and children is common and frightening. CDC statistics show that one out of four women experience domestic violence in their lifetimes. Nearly three out of four Americans (74 percent) know someone personally who is or has been a victim of domestic violence.
Imagine (or remember) being small and dependent, at the mercy of a parent who towers over you—a giant figure who, on becoming disturbed by something, suddenly becomes enraged. A young child who lives in a dysfunctional family with a bipolar, borderline, post-traumatic-stress-syndrome or rageaholic parent lives in an emotional landscape that resembles this mythical world in which mortals live their lives in relationship to powerful Olympians. In families like these, a little girl can be punished for not doing something beyond her abilities. In one household, a father demanded that his daughter make him a cup of coffee; when she couldn't and tried to say so, she was backhanded and told that she was no good. In another, a boy was whipped for crying and told he would now have something to cry about!
In the story of the Calydon boar, it is a goddess whose rage is devastating, just as a furious mother's outbursts can be to a small child. Women are responsible for 15 percent of domestic violence reports in the United States.
The mythical and patriarchal world of classical Greece was violent from the beginning. It was driven by a cosmology where fathers and grown sons fought for power, and in which rape and incest were common. Once Zeus became chief god, he ruled from Olympus through fear with his thunderbolts. Likewise, fear of judgment and punishment from above is a source of fear or dread in many adults. If they surpass a parent, differ in values, or challenge a fundamental religious belief, they live in a state of “waiting for lightning to strike.” This is an archetypal pattern when it is lived out in a home or country headed by a punitive and unpredictable despot whose word is law.
The enormous boar that an outraged Artemis sent to devastate the Calydon countryside, when the king honored other divinities, but not her, was vividly described in Bulfinch's Mythology: “Its eyes shone with blood and fire, its bristles stood like threatening spears, its tusks were like those of Indian elephants. The growing corn was trampled, the vines and olive trees laid waste, the flocks and herds were driven in wild confusion. People fled behind walls, the only hope of safety.”
This ravening beast is a powerful negative symbol of Artemis. Other symbols of her, like the stag or quail, have a “now you see them, now you don't” elusiveness about them. The bear can be ferocious, but this is an aspect of a protective mother that comes out when her young are threatened. The Calydon boar, however, has no redeeming qualities. It is deliberately created by Artemis to cause damage in her rage at being snubbed or unacknowledged. Once it comes to life and begins ravaging the countryside, it is out of control.
When a woman with a cause becomes so outraged that she is out of control and can't see that this is damaging both her cause and herself (as well as innocent others), she has been taken over by her Calydon boar. She doesn't care who or what her words or actions hurt. Hers is an outrage that begins with a sense of entitlement—she is somebody of significance and value who has been dismissed as inconsequential. How dare they! Or she acts as an avenger of injustice who brings retribution. She, someone she loves, or something she values has been treated with disrespect or abused. She will get even! Her Calydon boar anger grows out of all proportion.
Justification and righteousness are like the impervious pelt of the boar, the thick skin of defensive armor that protects against barbs of criticism. An outraged woman does not recognize the person she has become or realize that the centered, fair-witness part of herself has been trampled underfoot and is a casualty of her own righteous anger. This dynamic obviously applies to men as well, who usually (because of patriarchy) have a greater sense of entitlement and are therefore more susceptible to feeling humiliated.
The Calydon boar may take over a woman's inner life when she suppresses a seething rage, thus destroying her own inner landscape. There is no peace inside her; she no longer sees the beauty of nature around her; she is annoyed by her beloved animals; she puts a wall up between herself and others and wants to be left alone. It could be that her anger, compounded by her strength of will, prevents her from feeling grief and disappointment, which keeps tears from welling up. She fears looking weak or emotional. Hidden under her anger, provoked by whatever set it off, she may be harboring a reservoir of anger and grief, a yearning to be valued and loved. If Artemis hadn't been slighted, and instead had been honored and valued or even loved, she would not have unleashed the boar on Calydon.
To be full of rage, to harbor hostile thoughts toward others, to be obsessed by slights, is harmful to the psyche of the person who has these feelings. A dream helped one woman begin to understand this. She told me that work was not going well. She had begun at a new position for which she was well qualified; she could handle what she was hired to do with relative ease. The problem was with co-workers. She had gotten off on a wrong note, somehow. She felt that they talked behind her back and were resentful when she made suggestions. Her academic credentials were superior to theirs, and she had more experience. She found herself belittling them in her mind and was preoccupied by imaginary conversations in which “she showed them!”
In this woman's dream, she was in a familiar country church. She stepped outside to find two large dogs who snarled and attacked her, going for her throat. At first, she equated the dogs with her co-workers. But in talking about the slights, she realized that it would be a gross exaggeration to say that this is how they were intended. Moreover, the attack stood in contrast to the peaceful feelings she had in the church. It was when she left this symbol of the Self—or spiritual center—that the dogs attacked. She was open to the possibility that the dogs could represent both an exaggerated perception of her co-workers and something in herself that could get paranoid and was destructive to her. If they were “her” dogs, then they endangered her. She found that this insight gave her the choice of taking deep breaths and centering, or getting all worked up by her own thoughts. Once she changed her inner world, the atmosphere in her outer world at work gradually changed as well, as did her dreams.
If this woman had gone to work day after day thinking the worst of the others in her office, belittling them because she felt that she deserved the respect of her position and education, the office staff would naturally have spent as little time around her as possible and not included her in the informal camaraderie of people who work together. Worse still, if she continued to live with mental attack dogs as inner company—if she nursed slights and hostile thoughts—she risked becoming a bitter woman.
When you feed the attack dogs in your mind, you make them more powerful and destructive to your soul and relationships. The off-centeredness that goes with this affects your judgment about the situation, about others, and about yourself.
No one is ever her usual or best self when an “attack dog” complex takes over and is consequently obsessed by envy, or dwells upon slights, or harbors hostile or paranoid feelings about the thoughts or motives of others. An “attack dog” is a powerful metaphor that has the same meaning as the Calydon boar. It's that part in the psyche that reacts with defensive hostility, when it attacks others in anger. It has to be faced and disempowered by the woman in which it lives. It can be transformed through developing discernment and restraint in the present plus insight and compassion into its origins in the past. What remains are the protective qualities of Artemis, which is like a companion dog that has good instincts to sniff out real danger, is a protector of boundaries, guardian of the one-in-herself virgin goddess archetype in a woman's psyche, and defender of vulnerable others: a good dog!
Calydon's king calls upon the heroes and would-be heroes of Greece to come on a great hunt to kill the boar. These are by nature aggressive men used to taking what they can by force. As they assemble, the king begins to feel uneasy about going on the hunt and leaving his castle unguarded. Yet he fears that, if he doesn't go on the hunt, Meleager may be at risk. The loss of his heir would endanger the kingdom. When he voices this quandary to the queen, she assures him that he can stay in the castle and doesn't have to worry about Meleager. She shows him the hidden chest that contains the partially burned log and tells him the story of Atropos' visit.
To volunteer to join the boar hunt is a call to adventure, a chance for fame, and a test of physical courage. Like Jason's quest for the Fleece or, a generation later, Agamemnon's expedition to Troy, it is a challenge for men only. Atalanta is the exception. Now, women can be astronauts, or soldiers and officers in armed conflicts. They can form expeditions to climb mountains—those who do are likely to have Artemis as a major archetype and be similar to Atalanta. But even today, these women run into resentment and the risk of rape from some men who think they do not belong with them. Women who think that they are accepted as “one of the boys”—as equals to men—often find out that this is not the case.
The story of the hunt is told in great detail by all the classical writers. They all give the names of the men in a long roll call, including mention of the sons they will later father, as for Peleus, the father of Achilles. They give a blow-by-blow narrative of what they do—to no avail. Some are gored, trampled, or slashed by the boar's tusks. Their weapons, deflected off the thick hide of the boar, sometimes wound others. The wiley boar stays hidden at first, and then explosively charges out from behind a grove of willows as the hunters pass close by his hiding place. The boar chooses a strategic location. The hunters can neither surround it nor mass an attack; they have to attack singly or in pairs.
Atalanta holds her ground as the boar charges toward her. She has to stop the boar or it will destroy her. It takes courage to hold steady and aim true, and to fire the arrow that enters the boar's eye and penetrates its brain. The boar staggers, and Meleager delivers the death blow with his sword.
By facing the boar, Atalanta faces the destructive aspect of Artemis. For women who are archetypally similar, this is a confrontation with the shadow in themselves. A woman who feels righteous anger at indifference toward what is sacred to her is susceptible to being taken over by outrage and losing all sense of proportion or compassion. She becomes possessed by the boar when she acts like one herself and makes anyone who tries to reason with her an enemy. What begins in her as compassionate action to save girls and women—or as deep ecological concern for deforestation and pollution of the environment, or her heartfelt response to witnessing cruelty to animals—becomes blind rage that consumes her and threatens the very humanity that is the source of her concern for vulnerable others.
It takes courage to confront the inner boar, for doing so means that a woman must confront her own destructiveness directly. To do so, she has to see—better yet, feel—how much damage she has done to herself and others by trampling on their feelings, or on what they have been tending that she did not value. She needs to feel remorse for the contempt and judgment she unleashed on others in the past, and realize that only she can stop it. With this intention and determination, she can rein in those feelings. Whether in a family matter or a global one, to become an avenging goddess is a bad thing for a woman and for those around her—who are, after all, not all bad, as she tends to feel once she gets worked up. Insight into this behavior often uncovers an underlying attitude of superiority and arrogance, which are the very qualities she finds intolerable in others. Confronting the inner boar can become a lesson in humility.
There is a line in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets that an arrogant woman or an alpha male would do well to understand:
the only wisdom we can hope to acquire
is the wisdom of humility
In failing to honor and sacrifice to the sacred feminine represented by Artemis, the king brings destruction down on his kingdom. The people and the land suffer from an indiscriminate force of nature, symbolized by the boar, that destroys everything in its path. This same patriarchal mindset—which fails to honor the sacred feminine, fails to protect the planet and all life on it, and to make sacrifices to sustain what we have—is resulting now in the indiscriminate consequences of climate and weather change.
Tornados in the Midwest have been tearing up everything in their paths, wreaking havoc and returning to do more of the same, leaving behind devastation that resembles that done by the boar. Likewise floods, hurricanes, drought, forest fires, and rising seas are indicators of climate change that is happening because we cease to honor our relationship to a living planet. Gaia, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, are aspects of the sacred feminine or Great Goddess, who provides us with air, water, food, and beauty, out of which all things are born and into which they return. Like Artemis, Mother Nature reacts with destruction when there is no appreciation, no care-taking, no valuing or sacrifices made on her behalf.
Not enough trees, too many people is a simple equation that equals global warming and Calydon-boar effects. For Atalanta and Artemis, who are at home in forests—and for those of us who are “tree people”—trees are beautiful and have individual characteristics. Many live far longer than we ever will, and we recognize that trees and we ourselves are interdependent. Trees store carbon dioxide and transform it into nutrients and oxygen; they maintain the watershed by a root system that holds earth and water like a sponge that prevents floods, making more fertile earth as they compost their leaves. The arboreal and tropical rain forest—the lungs of the planet—are being clearcut and are also catching fire. Behind this destruction is a shortsightedness and a desacralization of nature. Trees become so many board feet of lumber; forests are being replaced by cash crops like soybeans or palm oil.
I came to appreciate what trees do for us after losing an effort to save a beautiful Monterey pine in front of my house. In an area where morning fog is fairly common, pine needles distill the fog into drops of water to provide moisture to the plants and soil under the tree's canopy. Once this tree was cut down, I could see how it had been the center of a balanced ecological system. Besides teaching me about what trees do, the loss of this one tree led me to understand the difference between “tree people” and “not tree people.” As a result of what I leaned, I wrote Like a Tree: How Trees, Women, and Tree People Can Save the Planet (2011).
For those who are not tree people, a tree is a thing, without intrinsic value. While the tree I tried to save was in front of my house, it was not on my property, but on “commons” held within a homeowners' association. Once a neighbor wanted it taken down, its fate depended on a vote and, in the rules and regulations of the association, preservation of scenic views had the highest priority. However it was a side view. The tree was there before any houses were and, for people who love trees, a tree can also provide a scenic view. Fear among association members was fanned by an urban legend that pine trees can explode in extreme heat, and this discussion was occurring in a wildland-urban interface area where fire hazards are taken seriously. Another argument was that, if the tree fell over or one of its branches fell and hurt someone, the association would be held liable. In the face of these concerns, the tree cutters prevailed.
In the time of classical mythology, most of Greece and Europe were covered with forests. Artemis' affinity for the woods did not require any effort to save them. But while this isn't part of her mythology, many women who share characteristics of Atalanta/Artemis are among those who save trees and forests. In India in the 1970s, the Chipko movement became the first successful movement in which women saved trees (chipko in Hindi means “tree huggers”). Twenty-seven women stopped deforestation by hugging the trees to prevent them from being cut down. An historical precedent occurred in 1730, when Amrita Devi and her three daughters were martyred rather than allow loggers to cut down a sacred khejri tree. Facing a charging boar and facing down angry loggers with bulldozers and axes takes courage. The spirit of Artemis was very much present in these activists.
The arrow that Atalanta shot wounded but did not kill the boar. Because it is Meleager who deals the fatal blow, he is entitled to the pelt as a trophy. But instead of keeping it for himself, Meleager gives it to Atalanta, acknowledging that the two of them together had succeeded. The men, however, protest that this prize should not go to a woman. Meleager's two uncles demand that, if he wants to give the pelt away, it should go to them. One of them snatches at the pelt, but Meleager acts swiftly, swinging his sword and decapitating first one and then the other of his uncles. Their heads roll. There is no further protest, and everyone heads back to the castle for food and drink—except Atalanta and Meleager.
The hunting party tells the story of the hunt, and of how Atalanta's arrow drew first blood and Meleager killed the boar. Then they tell why and how Meleager killed his uncles. The queen is grief-stricken and furious, overcome by conflicting feelings. She grieves for her brothers and is appalled that Meleager killed them. She blames Atalanta. In her anger, she retrieves the partially burned log that Atropos showed her and orders the servants to build a pyre. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the queen's despair and long soliloquy easily rival Hamlet's, showing the anguish she feels as mother and sister war within her. The sister wins. She throws the log into the fire, then drives a knife into her own heart, crying: “A death for a death, a crime for a crime, and trouble added and multiplied! So this cursed house shall go to ruin.”
Meanwhile, Meleager and Atalanta linger in the familiarity of the wilderness, enjoying their love, their success, and their fame as a couple. Suddenly Meleager is overcome with a burning pain; he clutches his midsection and doubles over. And there, in the forest, he dies in Atalanta's arms.
Myth and life resemble one another when the power of life and death held by a man's mother is metaphoric and it is his emotional life over which she exercises control. Meleager's mother kills off the possibility that he can have a life with Atalanta. Many mothers do the same by manipulating their son's feelings, killing off a relationship by raising doubt, anxiety, responsibility, guilt, or shame.
Some readers may remember ending the love of their life or abandoning a soul mate after they were judged “unsuitable” or “inappropriate” or even “unnatural” by parents. The reasons for the opposition may have been differences in social class, religion, race, age, or gender-related. When pressure to adhere to family and cultural expectations is brought to bear on a son (and especially daughter), it is often the mother, who has been delegated by an assumption that is collectively held that it is her responsibility as a wife and mother to do this.
In real lives, a self-centered/narcissistic mother who believes that she knows best and knows more about her son's feelings than he does can raise him to be more aware of her feelings than his own. By the time he is a man, she can convince him that he should not trust himself to know who is the right mate for him. His tendency to acquiesce as an adult to what his mother says begins when he becomes the center of her emotional life beyond infancy and childhood. Maternal instinct bonds a mother to her baby and, for a time, a child's physical survival and growth depend upon being bonded to its mother. After a while, a normal tension develops between dependency and separation. From the time a child takes its first steps and learns to say “no,” it is developing a separate sense of itself apart from its mother. This includes having its own feelings, which an emotionally needy or controlling mother may thwart.
In the absence of adult emotional and physical relationships, the mother of a boy may turn to him to meet her needs for closeness. As he grows older, she needs him to be her mirror to assure her that she is important and attractive. She may train him to be attuned to how she feels by praising him for his sensitivity and withholding affection, or by making him feel guilty for not paying attention to her when she wants it. He may learn to suppress his own feelings after being told time and time again that he should be ashamed for having them. A boy with a self-absorbed mother may find that he had better not cry when he is disappointed, or show anger toward her, or become excited about or express affection for others. When spontaneity, joy, anger, or grief can't be expressed in the presence of a powerful or needy parent, it goes elsewhere. Supressed grief may become sadness; anger may find an undeserving target; joy may be stifled.
A self-centered and psychologically needy mother makes everything about herself. A son's attributes and accomplishments seem to become hers—far beyond just “reflecting well on her.” The difference between ordinary parental pride in a son or daughter and a psychologically unhealthy bond depends upon how much a parent is living through the child and whether the child is motivated primarily by pleasing the parent and avoiding the pain that comes with disapproval. A son with the intelligence to do so quickly learns what not to say. After a time, he learns not to pay attention to himself or to what he really feels or observes in others or about others. Emotional intelligence (EQ), like any other human ability, is favored or not by circumstance and is developed by encouragement and words that can communicate feelings and perception. Clear feeling, like clear thinking, does take practice.
In dreams as well as myths, people die. In our dreams, however, they are not characters from ancient myths; they are most likely people we know in our own lives, mixed with celebrities that are symbolic characters. It's not surprising, then, that dreams in which someone dies or is dead are often alarming, because our first inclination is to take the dreams literally. On awakening, the dreamer tries to check out the accuracy of the dream. Usually, it is not true; on rare occasions, however, it may be a telepathic or precognitive dream, which often has a different quality from normal dreams. Usually, the dream signals a symbolic truth about a relationship with the person who is dead or dying (something has died in the relationship), or it may be about what the person symbolizes in the psyche of the dreamer. The dead or dying person is then an attitude, a prejudice, or an identification or connection that is losing its influence on the dreamer.
These dreams contrast with numerous dreams I've heard about in which the person in the dream has died in reality and yet is very much alive in the dream. In these dreams, the dreamer is aware that the person has died and is glad to see him or her in the dream itself. These dreams often come when it is important to be reminded that something about that person or what he or she represents continues to be very much alive. They differ in quality and intensity from “visitation dreams,” which come while the dreamer is still in mourning and has a vivid dream that has the impact of a real visit.
Interpretation of a myth or a dream, or of a synchronistic event in real life that can be interpreted as a dream, is another approach to deepening the meaning. It begins with “What if?” What if this myth fascinates you because there is “something” more to glean from it? What if the major characters are all inner figures? Who, then, is Meleager? In Jungian psychology, he is the inner masculine in a woman—the animus, who, in partnership with the feminine ego, faces the boar. He is the ability to act decisively, objectively, impersonally, and effectively in concert with a conscious and courageous feminine who faces her emotion-laden shadow.
When you shift the protagonist role from Atalanta to Meleager in the hunt for the boar and consider the death of Meleager as symbolic, it becomes another very meaningful story with parallels in real life. Meleager comes to the gathering of the hunters with Atalanta at his side. But this hunt is a guy-thing! She doesn't belong there! Her presence is not welcomed; there is muttering against her. Until then, the relationship between the two was a private, in-the-forest relationship—meaning that it was either closeted from others or, as a feminine aspect in his psyche, was developing in the privacy of his inner world. His bond with her is an authentic choice, not one made by collective values or family expectations. To bring Atalanta to the hunt and defend her right to be there makes their relationship public. With the objective being the hunt, and each man intent on gaining fame for himself, arguing over her presence is put aside.
Then comes the hunt itself. Atalanta draws the first blood with her arrow; Meleager strkes the decisive blow with his sword; together they bring down the boar and he gives her the trophy pelt. Outrage over the gift stirs up resentment and Meleager kills his uncles. His uncles, however, are extensions of his mother—her animus figures, upholders of her rights and attitudes, symbols of her power over her son's emotional life. When Meleager kills them, he is symbolically killing his mother's influence over who he loves and what he does. This causes his mother to reassert her power over her son's life, killing first him and then herself.
The energy bonds between two people that define a relationship need to be taken down by both for the old pattern to truly be over. As a metaphor in real life, this is about the painful separation between the hold of a mother (or father) who lives through the son (or daughter or spouse) and the life planned for him and his becoming his own person. The deaths of mother and son symbolize the end of this old bond. In real life, however, there are more chapters yet to come.