Marlo Thomas begins the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Free to Be . . . You and Me with “Dear You.” She says: “You'll also notice that, even though the characters in this book have names that are different from yours, they're really all about you. Free to Be . . . You and Me was written to remind you that you are the hero of your own life adventure, and that you can write your story any way that you dream it can be.” It warms my heart to think that many young readers may have taken these words to heart and that they may now as members of the millennial generation (born between 1980–1995) be contributing to a “free to be” world.
The message of Free to Be . . . You and Me also fits the intention of this book. Myths and stories come most alive when there is a corresponding active archetype in us. Archetypes are patterns, innate ways of being and responding—some more instinctual than others—that are in the collective unconscious. The indomitable spirit that I associate with the Artemis archetype may be apparent practically from birth. In others, Artemis remains latent and may emerge much later in life, or not at all. All archetypes are potentials, any one of which may, for a time, be very important and underlie a phase of life. Archetypes are a way of seeing the “lay of the land,” the psychological geography of a person. There will be characteristics in common with others with the same archetype, but each person is a unique and special variation of it.
This life we have, with its twists and turns, is our story to shape and find meaning in. Enthusiasm and vitality are signs that we are living the life we were meant to live or are being who we were meant to be. When this is not so, there may be emotional numbness, a pervasive sadness, anxiety, and various bodily pains from tensions and stress—all of which can happen when we put on a persona or social face and identify with a role, acting as if we enjoy and want to be in the life we have. Taking a pill for what ails us may make us more comfortable, but this doesn't bring us a sense of authenticity and spontaneity, which becoming real does. Real, as I define it, has to do with soul—soul work and soul connections, terms I use interchangeably with heart work and heart connections. This is not logical (logos) knowledge; this is gnosis—intuitively felt knowledge. When you are doing soul-satisfying or heart-centered work, you know it; when you have a soul or heart connection with another person, you know it.
Some things, some people, and some places resonate deeply with an archetype within us. To be able to make choices based upon soul, heart, and archetype gives us a passion for life and a life that is personally meaningful. This is possible only when we are “free to be you and me” and have opportunities and the freedom to choose a soul path. Trust that we know when a path is right for us grows as we travel it, because we come to love what we are doing and who we are becoming. This expands consciousness and makes us more receptive to beauty and to feeling part of something larger and ineffable.
Whether it is possible to follow a strong intuition that this is the direction to go toward, or that this calling or love is right for us, requires freedom to choose. When we are at a crossroad and must decide which direction to take, or are in a transition or liminal phase where there are no defining landmarks, we are in migration. Moving toward what? Often, we don't know where we are going, but know that it feels right. Even when we set out to cover a known number of miles—as Cheryl Strayed did when she started to walk the Pacific Crest Trail, or as Elizabeth Danu did when she set out to bicycle from Seattle to San Diego—reaching the destination becomes almost incidental compared to the experience.
In her poem “The Perpetual Migration” (The Moon is Always Female, 1980), Marge Piercy writes with a poet's ambiguity when she refers to “we:”
How do we know where we are going?
How do we know where we are headed
till we in fact or hope or hunch
arrive? You can only criticize,
the comfortable say, you don't know
what you want. Ah, but we do.
Is she speaking about you and me? About women? About humanity? Or, as it seems to me, about all of the above? When she asks how we know where we are going, I think of the instinctive migrations of birds and fish, of sprouting seeds that grow upward toward the sunlight. I think that humankind is on an evolutionary journey, which is our migration. And each of us participates in where we are going. In my profession, I see how individuals thrive when they can make meaningful choices and when their individual gifts are encouraged to develop. I see how fear inhibits and how love expands consciousness. I see that consciousness involves intellect, heart, and soul. I see how people change and evolve to become more spiritual and compassionate. I see them realize when they are in narcissistic codependent relationships, and I see them use this insight to change their behavior—which allows them to change the relationship or choose to leave it. I speculate that what is true for individuals may be coming true for humanity. Perhaps this is why democracy is a rallying movement in countries that have been ruled by despots. Or why the news is full of incidents in which ordinary people, including women, are taking to the streets in protest and celebration.
Each of us thinks of ourselves as a separate entity and yet, as members of humanity, we are traveling together with our species. Our individual psyches echo themes in the collective—egalitarian and patriarchal, expansive and regressive, fearful and loving. We move through historical time in much the same way as immense schools of small fish move through the sea or as huge flocks of birds in migration fill the skies. In this collective of over seven billion human beings, the archetype of Artemis is being liberated through individual women. Feminism, equality between men and women, sisterhood, circle rather than hierarchy are ideas with the power to transform individuals, who in turn shift the direction of collective humanity through the effects of being in the human morphic field, influenced by changes in the collective unconscious as well as by conscious thought and action.
Those with an active Artemis archetype come into the world with self-determination, a strong will, and the ability to focus. This likely also comes with a sense of fairness, an egalitarian attitude, and a protective emotional response toward weaker others who can't protect themselves. A girl had better hide these qualities and values if she grows up in circumstances where she must be obedient, seen and not heard. A boy with a strong will, self-determination, and focus may be praised for these qualities, but wherever domination is equated with masculinity, boys with an innate sense of equality, fairness, and protectiveness may hide it in order to be “one of the boys” and a man among men. In either situation, that which is unacceptable and labeled as unfeminine or unmasculine goes underground, where it can become a source of feeling badly about ourselves. But if a child is wise—and many are—he or she learns from observing and is realistically cautious about expressing this part of herself or himself. The indomitable spirit in them, while not exposed and expressed, may be supported to grow in the imagination by stories and myths—and now also by news and ideas that reach them through the Internet.
Joy emerges with freedom because, when there is freedom to be creative and expressive, there is joy. When power dominates the psyche, the family, or the halls of patriarchy, there is a notable lack of joy, because power goes hand in hand with fear. Fear inhibits laughter, spontaneity, and creativity; it squelches the inner child and is not concerned about what is best for children, the country, or the planet. Where power and intimidation rule, paranoia is adaptive. Inner peace in such psyches or households or institutions is absent. Walking as if on eggshells, so as not to set off explosive anger or punitive action, is adaptive. Wherever violence is a reality or power has the last word, joy is missing.
In contrast, when you are free to be yourself, joy is a significant element in your life. Watch a child do something on her own that takes effort. For example, when a little Atalanta takes her first steps on her own—she beams at the accomplishment and wants to do more of this. She does not need an audience to encourage her or to hover over her in case she falls and hurts herself. She will fall; she will pick herself up; and she will stick with it until she can walk—and then run. One day, she'll put this same effort into climbing a tree or achieving a goal; she will fall and pick herself up, and keep at it until it's done. Later in life, that same determination may make her persevere in her activism or her work. She may be an athlete that strives for her personal best or a competitor who wants to be the best. She may work at something until it is done to her own deep satisfaction. These are moments of achieving or creating something that has internal value. It doesn't matter if there is anyone else to see what she has done, or anyone who understands the big smile on her face. There is inner joy at having done it. Appreciation from others, applause, rewards—these are secondary satisfactions that may come later.
When perseverance and focus are built-in traits, an Atalanta/Artemis is hard to distract when she's intent on what she is absorbed in doing, or when she has strong feelings—which are likely to be about limits on her autonomy or something she protests as not fair! It seems that such a girl comes into the world ready to declare her sovereignty—a word usually applied to a nation that means autonomy, independence, liberty, self-determination, self-governance, and freedom.
These are qualities that are not welcomed in girls and women in households within patriarchal cultures, however, or in those with a controlling parent. Punishment and judgments, abuse and restrictions teach these girls that they are not free to be who they really are. Efforts may be directed at breaking their spirit if they persist. With perseverance and the ability to aim for a distant target when it is possible, however, girls raised in families that are oppressive may decide to bide their time until they can leave home at eighteen to express their sovereignty.
While parents and society may support or suppress some archetypes and encourage others—whether welcomed or not if a girl starts life with a strong streak of Artemis in her psyche—these are attributes that she has and that they react to. Daughters with indomitable spirit come from a variety of families. In my practice and awareness, their fathers and mothers vary. They may have been raised into adulthood in an intact nuclear family, or one parent may have died when they were young. Their mothers may be professionals or corporate executives, or may work for other women as domestics or be full-time homemakers; they may be single mothers, or disabled by depression or mental or physically illness. Their fathers may have been benign, indifferent, involved, or distant; they may have been loving or abusive and susceptible to rages made worse by drinking. They may have been successful Zeus figures whose daughters are the apple of their eye; or they may have molested or raped their daughters, or demeaned and abused them. They may have been world famous, or failures in their own eyes and the eyes of the world. They may have been eternal hippies. Their daughters may have been latch-key kids.
In short, there is no family constellation that creates daughters with indomitable spirit. It is an archetypal attribute that includes being “one-in-herself.” Efforts to “break their spirit,” as one might a spirited horse, may or may not succeed—as can killing them. Or they may become convinced that this archetype makes them bad, unworthy, and unfeminine, and turn on it themselves. In this case, these daughters become ashamed of the Artemis qualities that would otherwise be a source of authenticity and meaning for them.
In mythic times, travelers on the road to Athens had to pass Procrustes and his bed. I think of Athens as a symbolic destination, and all of us as travelers who experience lying on his infamous bed. If you were too tall for the bed, one “whack” and you were cut down to size to fit it. If you were too short for the bed, you would be stretched, as on a medieval torturer's rack, until you fit. “Procrustean” has come to mean conformity to expectations which are often arbitrary.
Athens was a center of power and of culture. It stood for collective goals and expectations. Encountering Procrustes on the “road to Athens” is thus a story about social acceptability, gender expectations, and conformity—the many hoops we must jump through to impress others, to get into schools from pre-Kindergarten on, to be hired, to become engaged and married, to be invited where we want to go. We are put on this Procrustean bed over and over; it is what shapes what others see about us and determines how they judge us. In order to be accepted, we suppress qualities of which family, religion, society, peers, potential mates, or spouses disapprove in order to fit their expectations.
In this Procrustean process, qualities that are considered attractive and acceptable can often be “stretched thin,” especially when we identify with our personas—the image we show others named for the tragedy and comedy masks worn by actors in ancient Greece—and do not acknowledge that there is more to us than how we appear. Procrustean-bed adaptations and conformity to expectations—where possible—support self-esteem, the acquisition of an education and a spouse, and entry into the adult world of work. These adaptations are often not personal enough or deep enough, however, until archetype and life come together.
Midlife crises are often initiated from Procrustean “amputations”—the suppressed and denied parts of our personality that were unacceptable. That which is cut off often remains alive in the unconscious, to be projected onto others, who then attract or repel us. Sometimes we turn to addictions to numb these feelings, but this may instead only loosen our control of them. It is only in the second half, or even the last third, of life that our individuality and creativity may emerge—sometimes out of the ashes of our former life
Midlife is a time when we take stock of where we are in life; we become aware of how quickly time has passed and that it is altogether possible that the number of years left to us are equal to or less than those we have lived so far. In Jungian psychology, this is the time for inner work, which involves, in part, going into the underworld to retrieve and “re-member” those parts of us lost in the Procrustean process. In Jungian analysis, “individuation” is important; its goal is to become genuine, not perfect, and to be as aware as we can be of what is acting on us and in us. Free to Be . . . You and Me envisioned a land where girls and boys could grow up to be who they were meant to be. This is pretty much the hoped-for outcome in Jungian work as well. Archetypes are important sources of meaning, but they may also be embedded in emotional complexes that can take us over. In this work, soul questions arise; image and essence may be in conflict. We may have to bear the tension of holding opposites, or take a big step without knowing where it will lead. Loyalty to others may conflict with responsibility for our own soul growth, holding us in a tension of opposites until a solution emerges that transcends the either/or dichotomy of logic.
Joseph Campbell said that the point is to find and live your personal myth. When asked how to do this, he answered with a question: “What gives your life a sense of harmony and bliss?” Or, as more poetically said by Lawrence LeShan, author of Cancer as a Turning Point (1994), the point is to find your song and sing it. LeShan's specific questions for his patients are applicable to us all:
What are your special and unique ways of being, relating, and creating that are your own and natural ways to live?
What is your music to beat out in life, your unique song to sing so that when you are singing it, you are glad to get up the morning and glad to go to bed at night, tired after a day well spent?
What style of life would give you zest, enthusiasm, involvement?
LeShan worked with terminal patients who were expected to die. Whatever treatments they had gone through—surgery, radiation, chemotherapy—had taken its toll and had not been effective. His questions required that his patients go back into past memory—to a time before the cancer, to childhood, to adolescence, to college, to previous phases of life, to times when they remembered being absorbed and happy. He encouraged them to remember what they were doing that was cut out of their lives and bring it back. Many did—and, as a result, over half went into long-term remission.
Then there is my definition of an “assignment,” which is what I have been calling my advocacy for a UN Fifth World Conference on Women (5WCW). The impetus behind this is my conviction that this is a means of energizing a global Women's Movement—a means to accelerate reaching the metaphoric “millionth circle,” the women's circle with a sacred center that, added to all the rest, becomes the tipping point that ends patriarchy. An assignment is something you volunteer for. It's something that feels as if it has your name on it. Something that asks questions only you can answer. Is it meaningful? Will it be fun? Is it motivated by love?
Historical gains made by women, beginning with suffrage, demonstrate a principle that research strongly validates. Women gain rights in a world where power is held mostly by men only when those at the top are motivated by feminist movements that come from the bottom up. We find a recent example of this in India. Only when women took to the streets to protest police disregard of rape was the political will generated to make and enforce laws to protect women. Mala Htun, of the University of New Mexico, and S. Laurel Weldon, of Purdue University, did a depth study of four decades of data collected in seventy countries (1975–2005). They found that it was grassroots feminist movements—not liberal politics, not women's representation in government, not national wealth—that made a difference (American Political Science Review, 2012). The study concluded that only strong feminist movements are able to voice and organize around their top priorities as women. In other instances, women are sidelined or subordinated to men's needs or the priorities of institutions or political parties.
It is time to recognize that the alpha males on top of pyramids of institutional, political, and corporate power and wealth are not best-suited to make decisions for humanity and the planet. They determine whether weapons of mass destruction will be developed and used; they seek to control the world's natural resources; they want to own water sources and control food supplies. And they may have sophisticated means to do these things. But if maintaining their power is their major motivation, they are nothing more than warlords or ganglords driven by adrenaline, testosterone, and the need to control property, women, and children.
We know from research at UCLA that women react to stress differently than men do. Women have a “tend and befriend” oxytocin response that is enhanced by estrogen; men have a “fight or flight” response, an adrenaline response that is enhanced by testosterone (Taylor, et. al., 2000). Collaborative agreements, the ability to compromise, the instinct to care for those who are vulnerable, an awareness of the ego needs of powerful men, and the ability to read emotional cues are skills that women, as a gender, have. We can see one example in the twenty women members of the United States Senate who worked out a bipartisan agreement and prevented a second government shut-down. Time magazine referred to them as “The Last Politicians” and said they were “looking like the only adults left in Washington” (October 28, 2013).
Women have more connections between right and left brain hemispheres; they have more symmetrical brains than alpha males. Women look for solutions beyond either/or, which is a left-brain dominant limitation. They multi-task, listen to stories, feel as well as think, collaborate, look after children. With education, equality, and empowerment, women are now developing and fine-tuning left-brain wiring. As a result, they have more symmetrical brains than men. Nurturing, creative men have this chracteristic as well; it is apparent in many gay men and men who have taken the opportunity to bond with their children and share work and life schedules with their wives. Men who have been directly influenced by the Women's Movement through their mothers and egalitarian fathers are different; they are “more whole” people than traditional male-identified men. In psychological terms, agency and affiliation are strengths encouraged in both women and men; in Jungian terms, it's the contra-sexual qualities of anima and animus development. Through cultural diffusion, whatever develops in America becomes an influence that is emulated or resisted around the world.
In what can only be called auspicious or synchronistic, I took a break from working on the end of this book to see what my friend, Patricia Smith, was up to. I found her engrossed in a new book, an amazing story of a feral girl who was raised by monkeys (The Girl with No Name, Marina Chapman, 2013). The girl was not quite five years old—she recalls that she was looking forward to her fifth birthday—when she was kidnapped from the vegetable garden near her home, most likely in Colombia, South America. She was probably chloroformed. She woke up and went back to sleep hearing the cries of other children. She was aware of being bounced about in a truck, then of being carried over the shoulders of a big man who was rushing or fleeing through the jungle. Then he dropped and abandoned her, and she was on her own in the wilderness.
When she was probably around ten years old, the girl was found by people who showed her far less “humanity” than the troop of Capuchin monkeys that had accepted her. In fact, the rest of her story is more harrowing than the time she spent in the jungle. She obviously did survive, for there is a story to tell, thanks to what she eventually told and taught her daughters—one of whom, Vanessa James, brought the story to print with the professional help of Lynn Barrett-Lee.
Abandoned in a tropical jungle and on her own, the girl with no name was hungry and thirsty—a scared four-going-on-five-year-old. She was surrounded by huge trees, with some sunlight filtering through to the forest floor. There were the sounds of birds and animals, creepy-crawlies, vines and flowers. It was a major stroke of luck that she found herself in the territory of an extended clan of monkeys, most likely Capuchin monkeys, that were smaller in size than she was and not aggressive toward her. They were curious, but not dangerous.
For a long time, the monkeys kept their distance, until the girl ate something that poisoned her and the grandpa monkey acted to save her life. After this, she became one of them. From the beginning, she watched them and ate whatever they ate—because she had learned the hard way that some berries or fruits can be pretty but poisonous. She drank from streams, and urinated and defecated as they did. She was barefoot to begin with and the dress she wore fell apart, leaving her naked, though her hair kept growing. When hunters found her, her hair had grown to cover her torso. By this time, she was a feral child of about ten who got around on all fours and made sounds like the monkeys.
The girl used intelligence and observation to distinguish one monkey from another. She learned what their sounds meant and practiced them herself until she could communicate. She aspired to climb like the monkeys and did not give up trying. She said: “Day after day, for what may have been several months, I would try to climb the shorter slimmer trees. I fell often—sometimes many times a day, and often far and painfully—but I didn't let my failures deter me.” She needed to use her feet as the monkeys did. At some point, she ceased walking on two legs and got around on all fours. She wanted to reach the forest canopy, where the sun was warmer and there were some good things to eat. After much perseverance, she did.
When hunters found her, Marina (as she came to be called later) was brought back to a civilization that was more dangerous and cruel than the wild jungle. The hunters sold her to a brothel owner. She was harshly cleaned and trained to behave as human children did. She was used as a domestic slave and kept as a prisoner. She escaped through her own efforts, lucky timing, and an accident of fate. To get away from a customer willing to pay to take her virginity, she hid in an automobile that left the brothel with two other prostitutes and a driver; she was the only survivor when the car was involved in a fatal crash. She was probably about eleven or twelve years old by then, but seemed younger because she was such a small girl—probably due to the jungle diet of mostly fruits, some nuts, and hardly any protein.
In the next two to three years, Marina became a street child who survived by her wits and by stealing. She formed a little gang, and what she saw happening to little ones, even babies, outraged her. She wrote: “I felt such powerful anger for these children. I was so young, and I knew little of the circumstances of these mothers, but my rage for their infants was intense.” These feelings for vulnerable, young others and her sense that this was so unfair—the injustice that she encountered and the expectation that it should be otherwise—are archetypally Artemis.
While other street kids sold drugs and used them, while other girls sold sex, Marina avoided both. Something innate in her was wary of losing her sovereignty; she did not want to be trapped and knew that both drugs and sex would trap her. A convent for orphans took her off the streets. There she had a bed, food, and the company of other children; but the price was the loss of her freedom. She would not exchange her freedom for the security of the convent; so, once again, she used her wits and ability to act instinctively and escape.
She went looking for a job as a domestic; in exchange for a place to sleep and food, she would do any household task. She knocked on many doors, but the doors were closed after one look at her. Then, it seemed as if her luck changed. The door to a big house was opened by a woman who had spoken kindly to her in the park and she gave Marina a job. Once in the house, however, she became a prisoner behind high walls and locked doors; this family turned out to be the local equivalent of the Mafia. One day, the head of the family walked in on her in the kitchen. He was not wearing his trousers and he started to feel up her legs. Rather than freezing, she looked around the kitchen for a weapon. She wrote: “I had the advantage of surprise. He didn't know me, and of course he would expect me to acquiesce. But no one—not even powerful Mr. Santos—was going to rape me. Not when I still had air in my lungs.” This was an instinctive one-in-herself Artemis response.
The girl with no name was a true-life Atalanta, which intrigued me. One name she did not claim was “victim.” Regardless of the circumstances or the adults around her, she retained a sense of agency and sovereignty. She didn't feel sorry for herself or give up. The idea of giving up on herself was never a consideration. I think that she had a commitment to survive and that, as a consequence, Providence moved to help her. As W. H. Murray, who headed the Scottish Himalayan Expedition, said: “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision.” I refer to “Providence” as synchroncity. Those who survive a grueling or harrowing journey and live to tell the story are usually resilient and inventive, but they also often tell of a stroke of luck, a miracle, or an uncanny coincidence that saved them.
The girl with no name had the good fortune to be abandoned in the vicinity of Capuchin monkeys, rather than in the midst of predators or other primates that live in this jungle. In The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal (2008), the world's foremost primologist, I learned that Capuchins are extremely smart. They have the largest brain relative to body size of all monkeys; they share food and cooperate easily with one another as well as with humans. They are small, cute monkeys, and their chattering kept Marina from feeling alone. Children who are in the natural world are drawn to what they see and can be absorbed and fascinated by it, as this girl was. The monkeys did not hurt her; they were company for her. When she gained their acceptance, she shared in the grooming of frequent touch, which monkeys do with each other. The Artemis/Atalanta in her was free to be, because the people or monkeys that were her “kin” had not abused her physically, sexually, or verbally. She had a better childhood, measured by this standard, than many little girls raised in affluence.
Eve Ensler is the playwright-activist who created The Vagina Monologues and One Billion Rising, global demonstrations to stop violence against women. She also wrote a memoir, In the Body of the World (2013), in which she tells of her affluent and abusive childhood. Hers is a much more common experience than most people are comfortable acknowledging. Her home was in Scarsdale, New York; her father was CEO of a food company, her mother a strikingly attractive, full-time, at-home unmaternal mother. She went to excellent suburban schools and graduated from a private college. Hers is an American picture of a privileged childhood on the surface. On the surface, it doesn't seem as if her story has anything in common with the girl with no name. Beneath the surface, however, she is also a survivor with an indomitable will and courage.
Eve's story begins with the body—her body, a place that she was “forced to evacuate when my father invaded and then violated me.” The girl with no name went to sleep with a wary ear—listening for danger, on alert for the sound of animals. Eve and many others with predator fathers do not go to sleep tucked snugly and safely in their beds; they sleep with a wary ear as well, alert for the sound of their fathers' stealthy footsteps in the hall, coming to violate them. When she was older and provoked him (fathers like these look for reasons to be abusive, because raging against a child makes them feel powerful), Eve recalls his “. . . hands choking my throat, [his] fist punching and bloodying my nose.”
Eve is a frontline feminist-activist who traveled to over sixty countries to raise awareness and support for abused girls and women. Through her V-Day activism, in which women all over the world perform The Vagina Monolgues to raise funds, her work has provided financial support for organizations that work to stop abuse. She did not have an affinity for Mother Nature or trees until she was in the third phase of her life, but her outrage and action on behalf of vulnerable girls and women is a clear expression of the Artemis archetype.
The story of Eve's childhood, her alienation and dissociation from her body (a common result of incest or molestation), and the diagnosis of stage four cancer of the uterus and its treatment came together with the impact of going to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she heard and saw the results of the rapes, mutilations, and torture of female bodies from infancy to old age. Her memoir tells of being reunited with her body, and how this united her with the body of the world. Eve writes that, if you are separated from your body, you are separated from the body of the world; everything is connected—oil spills, pillaged earth, rapes. Women activists work to save or protect something they love. It's mother-bear protectiveness on behalf of the vulnerable; it's the archetype shared by women activists. Their causes may differ, but the passion, perseverance, and intensity of their advocacy is an expression of Artemis.
Malala Yousafzai, at fifteen, became the youngest person to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was described as a three-year-old who was a delight to her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who named her after Malalai, the Afghan Joan of Arc. She went everywhere with him; she was special.
School was the center of Malala's childhood world. Her father was headmaster of the school and the family had an apartment there. Like the pleasure Zeus took in Artemis, Malala's father delighted in his bright daughter, who was eager to learn and could sit absorbed in classes before she was old enough to be enrolled. Once she was a student, she became proficient in languages and fluent in English. Malala's mother was traditional and chose to remain in purdah in public, but she backed her daughter's independence in private.
Malala was eleven years old when the Swat Valley, in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan, fell under Taliban rule. Their control finally extended over the entire valley. She was a schoolgirl in Mingora in the lower valley, a vacation destination during the summer months for people from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Sufi music, dance festivals, a nearby UNESCO site of Buddhist art and ruins were attractions. She attended Khushal school for girls, one among 200 that had existed prior to the Taliban. Behind the tall cement walls, Khushal school was an oasis of enlightenment and freedom.
When Malala was twelve, all the girls' schools in the Swat Valley were closed. Her family fled the valley, along with 1.5 million other refugees, when the Taliban took complete control in 2008. They returned when the Pakistan military became a presence in Mingora and the schools reopened. Journalists sought Malala out when they found she could speak so clearly and passionately about what was happening. This led to her blogging under the assumed name of Gul Makai, the heroine of a Pashto folktale. In a widely distributed video, she announced: “I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every child to be educated.”
In 2012, Malala was returning home from school with friends when an armed gunman, thought to be Taliban, stopped the bus, identified Malala, and shot her in the head and neck. Initially, doctors did not know whether she would live—and if she did live, whether she would be paralyzed. The family moved to England, where multiple surgeries and physical therapy aided her recovery. After several operations, a titanium plate replaces part of her skull, her left jaw and facial nerves have been reconstructed, and a cochlear implant helps her left ear to hear.
Malala's spirit is indomitable. She continues to be an articulate spokesperson, as well as a symbol for the education of girls. On July 12, 2013, Malala addressed the United Nations. In her short and very moving talk, she focused on women's rights and girls' education. Gordon Brown, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former British Prime Minister, launched a petition in Malala's name that led to the ratification of Pakistan's first right-to-education bill in 2013. Her book I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban was also published in 2013. In her talks and writing, she urges women to stand up for their rights, to fight for independence. She voices the values of Artemis.
The details of these three narratives have nothing in common. What they do have in common is the indomitable spirit that each of them exemplifies. One woman is a grandmother now; the second is a cancer survivor on the road as an author and activist; the third is a young girl still in her teens with a titanium plate in her head. While Malala is the most famous of the three because she became the youngest nominee for a Nobel Peace Prize, I see Artemis qualities in each of them. But they are all more than the archetype. Like Atalanta, they are all vulnerable mortals.
It took an indomitable spirit, grit, and intelligence for Marina Chapman—a little girl barely five years old—to survive for five years on her own in a tropical jungle by emulating monkeys who gradually accepted her. This part of her childhood resembled Atalanta's mythic beginning, with bear cubs for playmates. It was after she returned to “civilization” that her other Artemis qualities instinctively surfaced—outrage at witnessing babies and young children neglected and treated badly; resisting the loss of autonomy to drug addiction or to a pimp; instinctively fighting off her rapist; leaving a group setting where she could be assured of a bed and food, preferring the freedom she had on the streets to security. Marina's conscious choices and instinctual reactions were expressions of the Artemis archetype. No one taught her to be like this; she had no role models.
The affluent suburban home where Eve Ensler grew up was the site of another remarkable childhood survivor story. Eve couldn't stop the incest and violence that her father inflicted on her. He could physically violate her; but the one-in-herself, virgin-goddess archetype remained intact. She hid this appalling trauma, as children with family secrets do. When she became a playwright and performer, the prohibition against even saying the word “vagina”—and what this meant about how women felt about what was “down there”—was the subject of her consciousness-raising, funny, and poignant Vagina Monologues. In her one-woman play, she is the voice for many characters, all of whom talk about, or avoid talking about, vaginas. Her play went on to be performed by women's groups who found in it a bonding and sharing experience; these performances also raised money to help non profits that helped women. Ensler's play is performed by others throughout the United States and beyond on V-Day, creating a ripple effect as more and more performances are done every year. This ripple is on the verge of becoming a tsunami with One Billion Rising, as thousands growing into millions dance in the streets to stop violence against women. Eve is living her personal myth, in which her abusive childhood became an impetus for her creativity and activism. Eve could not stop the violence done to her as a child, but she works to stop it for others and to help victims become survivors.
With One Billion Rising, everyone who participates—the women and men who come out dancing on V-Day to show solidarity and support to stop the violence, the Bollywood stars in India who create songs—is heeding a principle that Gloria Steinem has expressed many times, most recently in a talk just before she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom: “Remember: the end doesn't justify the means; the means are the ends. If we want dancing and laughter and friendship and kindness in the future, we must have dancing and laughter and friendship and kindness along the way. That is the small and the big of it” (Ms. magazine, Winter/Spring 2014).
Malala Yousafzai, the youngest of these three, was barely out of childhood when she began her mission to advocate for the education of girls. Her intellectual precocity and her fluency in many languages attracted foreign journalists, making her a source of news, but also a target for her enemies. Her resilience in the face of this danger and her fight to regain her health after she was shot made her a symbol of courage and an even more effective advocate for her cause.
There are two powerful synergistic forces shaping Malala into the person she is becoming: the active archetypes in her (Artemis/Athena) and the expectations that others have placed on her (that she is a heroine, that she is special). There is an analogy here to binocular vision, which I introduced in Goddesses in Everywoman (1984). We have depth perception because each eye sees the same object from two angles; our brain merges the two images, which provides visual depth. Similarly, two powerful forces act upon us whether we know it or not—the expectations of family and culture (stereotypes) and the archetypes that are active in us. Add to this the historical time and the particular place in which Malala lives—on the literal battleground between fundamentalist patriarchal beliefs and emerging ideas of democracy that lead to equal rights and empowerment of women. This ideological/psychological conflict is more extreme in Afghanistan than in North America, but the same struggle is taking place here. The United States has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment or ratified CEDAW (Convention Eliminating Discrimination Against Women).
Moreover, there is also something ineffable yet real in everyone that is mystical and spiritual, where personal meaning and free will come in. It's the universally held notion that each of us has a soul; with this comes the sense that we have our own soul's purpose, which has something to do with what we encounter of privilege and suffering, and how we respond.
I also see Marina, Eve, and Malala as examples of courageous and competent children. Many people need to remember that they were brave children. So many had to have courage to face real and imagined fears. Children feel afraid and do what is expected of them just the same. By forgetting these times, they also forget the brave children they had to be. For these children, everyday events were fraught with danger, a wilderness of unknowns—each new school, the neighborhood, the walk to school or to the store, coming home not knowing if it had been a good day or a bad one for a parent. These dangers are not usually as bad, objectively, as the dangers of living in an African village in the midst of civil war or having to walk miles to get water or firewood among possible human and animal predators. But for children, their perilous situations are their own personal danger zones. It takes courage and strategy for them to act casually while on hyper-alert, worried that their tormentors may be lying in wait for them after school or that an abusive parent may be on a rampage at home.
I think of the successful adults I know who, as children, had to call on courage daily. In middle school, a boy who didn't even know what gay meant was tormented by another boy and beaten up in front of others who watched. He was an unwilling participant in a spectator sport, which bullying usually is. And I think of the Asian professional whose family lived in a working-class white neighborhood and faced the possibility of running a gauntlet of demeaning name-calling on her way home after school. These children had an innate sense that it would make matters worse to tell adults about their torment, which it probably would have in both cases.
The danger or dread for many others lay at home—sometimes the risk of abuse; sometimes the social risk of classmates knowing what home life is like with a disabled or disheveled parent whose drinking or mental state fluctuates; sometimes the risk of acknowledging a sibling who is not normal. For one girl, it was her mother's emotional callousness toward her love of animals—a story that came out decades later in a women's circle. This woman told us that, while she was at summer camp, her mother gave her dog to the garbage man to get rid of it. She only learned about it when she came home. She knew better than to get upset at her mother, so she buried the incident in her mind and heart. As she remembered it, she sobbed like a child who finally knew it was safe to cry.
In nature, there are predators and prey. The wise child who is vulnerable to predators does what deer, horses, and rabbits do—they blend in with the environment or blend in with the group so as not to draw attention to themselves. Sometimes they freeze and don't move; sometimes they are especially wary at certain times of the day or in certain places. Without having a conceptual understanding of it, children who survive become experts at reading body language, moods, and other signs of what could come next, and also of certain times of the day and certain places. They learn not to show their feelings when it isn't safe to do so; they can and do displace or dissociate from them.
Children feel humiliated when they are treated badly or neglected by adults. They take on the shame adults deserve for what they do or don't do or should do. This psychological reality hurts the heart of the mother bear in me when I hear of it. It is bad enough when what should not happen, does happen; the unfortunate circumstances of natural disasters, war, and illness are part of life and suffering. But unnecessary, egregious suffering is inflicted by adults when a child has to bear the brunt of a parent's alcoholism, misplaced anger, scapegoating, indifference, or jealousy. Children are born good; they want to console or help another crying child or adult. They have an innate sense of justice. So, when they are treated badly or cruelly or neglectfully, they seem to assume they must deserve it. They assume they must be bad, which is compounded by verbal abuse that tells them so. Research done and compiled by Dacher Keltner in Born to be Good (2009) presents a convincing case that refutes patriarchal religions and patriarchal psychological theories that say otherwise. Young children want to see their parents as better than they are and are protective of their parents' image at the expense of themselves.
Racism, sexism, and all the “isms” that say that one kind of person is better than another are negative and destructive. And when you are led to believe that you are the “other kind” of child, this has a double negative effect. First you are treated unfairly; then you justify it. I remember a woman who grew up in the deep, segregated South. She was an educated black woman in a professional position in the Bay Area who was reminded by the unusually warm weather in San Francisco about how hot it was when she was a child. She told me that the white kids went swimming in the city pool, but she could not. She justified being excluded by saying what she had been told as a child—that it was necessary because “Negroes are dirty.” It hurt my heart that she had internalized this racism and held these prejudices against people who were like her.
Likewise, growing up in any patriarchal culture can result in internalized homophobia in gays and lesbians, and in women who devalue and mistrust other women. In some families, feelings of inadequacy and shame for being female are passed down through generations and, in spite of low expectations, if a girl does well anyway, this counts against her—even when there are no stigmatizing factors. And on top of all these “isms,” every girl and woman endures stereotyping and comparison to others and media examples of how women should look. This adds to feelings of inadequacy.
In their teen years, girls who have less-educated or socially or economically less-privileged parents than their classmates—or just parents who are different—can be made to feel shame. This leads to a diminished sense of value, and that judgment sticks until it is acknlowledged and examined. If the parents are immigrants or people who rose out of poverty, they are actually often courageous, hard-working, risk-taking pioneers who made sacrifices to raise their children in America or to send them to college. When you are able to see your childhood and your parents with clarity and compassion, this may restore a sense of worth and give you something of great value: pride in who you are and in your lineage, as well as a new appreciation for the child you were and for your parents.
Much is forgotten and left behind with childhood as we meet the challenges of becoming functioning, respectable adults. Yet, as an adult who was once shamed as a child, you may be susceptible to humiliation and shame, blaming yourself even when it is unreasonable and no fair objective witness would. Perhaps you may remember feeling shame and blame, or recall soul-searing negative words said about you or to you. Instead of others responding with compassion when something painful happens, the tendency is to blame the victim: “You must have invited this” or “you should have known better . . .”
Once you enter the area of recollected feelings and memories of childhood, you have an opportunity to see what happened to you or what you did in a different light. Perhaps you may become a fair witness for yourself—someone who now looks back on those periods of your life when you were shamed or behaved badly, and reappraises them from the perspective of an observing, compassionate, and forgiving adult. You also have an opportunity to appreciate that the child you were had to be brave. You probably were scared and young when whatever shamed you happened—yet you survived. You may have taken your grief and disillusionment out on someone else.
There is healing to be done and a new appraisal to make. Give yourself some credit—you did get through your parents' divorce, or a parent's suicide, or middle school, or the molestation, or family stresses, or the accident, or hospitalization, or the rape—whatever it was that was difficult, maybe even horrible.
When you remember the brave child you once were, consider what was missing then. What can you provide yourself with now? How can you be the adult you wanted at your side—one who loves and applauds, holds and comforts, feels for you but not sorry for you? It was your fate then; now, as an adult, you can be thankful for the child you were. Like a runner who carries the baton in a relay race, or the carrier of the Olympic torch who passes it on, the child you were took the first turn around the track and passed your experiences on to the adolescent, who faced what may have become an obstacle course. Then, from young adult to however old you are now, the cycles of your life continued.
The child who comes into the world with qualities of Artemis can turn to nature and receive much more than temporary shelter from the emotions of others or a place to cry out of sight. It may also have been a place to be curious and happy, to experience awe and wonder. An adult who is moved by nature's beauty and power has received this as a legacy from an Artemis child in her past. The child who is “under the protection of Artemis” keeps her connection to wonder, hope, and courage as she becomes the woman she was meant to be.
The “stuff” of which little Atalanta/Artemis girls are made is not “sugar and spice and everything nice.” It is courage in the face of pain and power, or perseverance that keeps up appearances and grades in school, or the resiliency to fall down and get up again. Maybe you were scared and acted as if you were not. Fear did not stop you from stepping up to the challenge of doing something you had never done before and did not know you could do. (This is what societies expect of little boys who are also scared, and young men who are sent to war.) It's having the imagination or inner knowledge that circumstances change and that not all people are like the ones who are oppressing you now. These qualities draw from an unsubdued, untamed spirit that is archetypal. These are qualities that you may have in common with women whose stories I hear in my office, in women's circles, and at the United Nations, where I learned of girls who raise themselves in the midst of armed conflicts, in refugee camps, in lawless cities where they know that they are prey. All were brave girls who held on to hope and became competent and courageous women who share the indomitable spirit of the Artemis archetype.
Some are now women on the front lines of feminism, animal rights, and nature. In their activism, they are like Artemis as the goddess of the hunt, who took action to protect those under her protection and punish those who violated what was sacred to her.
Feminist and mystic have been two sides of my own experience of Artemis as goddess of the hunt and goddess of the moon. Nature is where many of us have had numinous experiences—a fitting word, meaning an experience in which we feel awe beyond words for something ineffable, spiritual, mystical—and attribute it to divinity. Such experiences convey a sense of having a place in the universe; of being in a universe that is so vast as to be unimaginable, and yet to matter and have meaning within it. Gnosis again: this is not logical, any more than synchronicity and flow or an archetypal dream full of symbols beyond the experience of the dreamer can be explained rationally.
There is another aspect to Artemis as a moon goddess that I now realize comes with living long enough to have an inner psychological sense of the phases of the moon. This comes with my own living through the waxing moon, full moon, and now being well into the waning moon phase of my own life. I still feel outrage and an urge toward action, the two energies that propelled a younger version of me as Artemis armed with her bow and arrows to speak up or do something. The older and wiser version of Artemis is Hecate, the goddess of the waning moon and goddess of the crossroad. It is her counsel that I heed when deciding what I do, now. Is this an old habit—like a Pavlovian response? Or is there vitality and passion in my psyche for this? I'm aware that a goal I am furthering may not be accomplished or resolved in my lifetime, and yet it still matters that I do something to help the eventual outcome. I don't know how the lives of people I love and help will turn out either, and I won't stop loving them.
Lines from Rainer Maria Rilke fit this stage of my life: god is a real, unfathomable source of grace and meaning that I have circled around most of my life. I think of the primordial tower as my axis mundi or “the still point of the turning world,” to use a phrase from T.S. Eliot's “Burnt Norton.”
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?