Myths to Live By, Part 3

24 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Much of the information about the goddesses I’m using here came from Jungian psychiatrist Jean Shinoda-Bolen’s book Goddesses in Everywoman, which I think is an excellent book for understanding the ‘goddess’ styles as psychological dynamics that are alive and well today. In the book, she creates a prayer to the goddesses, appealing to the kinds of dynamics they represent. It isn’t appealing to distant divinities, but to inherent tendencies and awarenesses. Here are just the lines directed to the goddesses in today’s sermon:

ATHENA – help me to think clearly in this situation.

ARTEMIS – keep me focused on that goal in the distance.

APHRODITE – help me to love and enjoy my body.

HESTIA – honor me with your presence, bring me peace and serenity.

Let’s combine them into a more straightforward simple prayer:

Spirits of life, goddesses of our psyches, be with us here. Help us to think clearly. Keep us focused on our distant goals. Help us to love and enjoy our bodies, and honor us with your presence; bring us peace and serenity. Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By,” Part Three

In going over my notes about how the Greek goddesses divided the wide range that women have of being into separate deities/dynamics, I realized that this is really about the difference between politics and religion. That may not sound right: after all, we’re talking about goddesses, not political parties. But I think it is right. We’ll come back to this.

Two weeks ago, I brought you the three ‘dependent’ goddesses: Hera the wife, Demeter the mother, and Persephone the maiden. Today I want to bring you the uppity goddesses. They were called the Virgin, or Independent, Goddesses. They never married, and men were not necessary to make them feel completed. These goddesses were Artemis, Athena, and Hestia, plus the Wild Card: Aphrodite.

Artemis (Diana, to the Romans) was the hunter who spurned both men and society, and traveled with a band of women who served and looked up to her. She was not a friend of men. In fact, men were downright unsafe around her. Two of the most famous stories about her testify to this. One involves a lover named Orion whom she accidentally killed through her intensely competitive nature. He got to be a constellation, but if I were Orion that would be, at best, a consolation prize.

The most famous story about Artemis involved a young hunter named Actaeon, who was unlucky enough to see her naked ‘ in other words, to see her vulnerability. Artemis could not be aware of her vulnerability. She was so furious at him for this intrusion that she changed him into a stag and his own dogs killed him. This was the goddess whose mottoes could have been ‘Don’t fence me in’ and ‘Don’t tread on me’ ‘ or ‘Men Beware!’ Her close friends were women’she was also the only goddess who repeatedly came to the aid of her mother. During the heyday of the women’s movement, Gloria Steinem was the incarnation of Artemis, and Artemis was seen as the guiding spirit of the women’s movement.

Another of the Independent goddesses was Athena, whom the Romans called Minerva. Athena wore armor, and was a warrior goddess who protected her chosen heroes, all of whom were males. She was her daddy’s girl: the myth had it that she sprung full-grown from Zeus’s head, and she never acknowledged her mother. When Athena was pictured with another figure, that other was invariably a male: Achilles and Odysseus, for example, the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is a woman who fought for the male values and the patriarchal establishment. Unlike Artemis, she often fought for men and against women, and it was seldom safe for women to cross her path. Two of her stories show this.

The first was the story of Agamemnon, where it was Athena who would not give him victory in battle unless he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. In some versions of the story, Artemis insisted on sparing the girl’s life, but Artemis was never a match for Athena. Agamemnon killed the girl, after which Athena helped him win the military battle.

The second story – one of the great Greek stories, and the source of one of our scientific designations – is about the young woman Arachne. Arachne was, like Athena, a superb weaver. In fact, Arachne was so good she said that not even Athena could match her.

A dozen years ago I was stepfather to two young girls, the younger of whom loved the Greek myths. I would read them to her every night, and we went through four or five books of them, until the stories were old friends of hers, and she looked forward to revisiting them in each new book’s version. About the third time we revisited the story, we got to this point where Arachne said she was a better weaver even than Athena. Allison suddenly looked at me, shook her head, and said, ‘She’s dead meat!’

Athena challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, and both of them made flawless weavings. But the subject that Arachne chose for her weaving was her undoing, and shows where Athena’s real allegiance lay. Athena wove a heroic tapestry of Zeus’s great achievements and glories. Arachne wove a humiliating picture of three of Zeus’s sexual seductions and infidelities. And this so infuriated Athena that she tore Arachne’s weaving to pieces, then turned her into a spider, condemned forever to hang from a thread and spin: to this day, the biological name of spiders is ‘Arachnids.’ It was not Arachne’s impudence to Athena that doomed her; it was her impudence to Athena’s father and his privileges. For every Artemis who comes to attack men and their rules, there will be an Athena to protect them. In all the Greek mythology, Artemis never once won against Athena.

The third independent goddess, and the least known of the Olympians, was Hestia, whom the Romans called Vesta. Hestia was the only one of the six who was never portrayed in human form. She was more of a spirit, like a spirit of a contentment derived from going within, either in involvement with homemaking or spiritual meditation, like a nun in a convent. Hestia’s spirit is what makes a house a home, or turns a mere church service into a real worship service. Like the other self-contained goddesses, Hestia had no significant or necessary men in her life.

The final goddess is the most complex: the goddess Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. She was married to the lame craftsman Hephaestus, though she was never faithful to him and bore him no children. She had numerous affairs with both gods and men, however, and bore several children to them. Her favorite consort was the god of war, whom the Greeks called Ares and the Romans called Mars. Here was the union of our two most uncontrollable passions, love and war. If they can be kept in balance, they can produce harmony; otherwise, their offspring will be only terror and fear. And when you learn that the names of the three children from the matings of Ares and Aphrodite were in fact Harmony, Terror and Fear, you may begin to understand that mythology is not a fiction about some other world. Mythology is about insights into the deeper levels of our own lives. It is to help us in our search for harmony rather than fear and terror.

Aphrodite was, paradoxically, most like the introverted Hestia, in that both of them found their completion by following their love, their lust, or their inner bliss. Hestia withdrew from men while Aphrodite interacted with them, but Aphrodite interacted with men the way a wine connoisseur interacts with a fine wine: enjoying its qualities, but just for a while. The T-shirt slogan “So many men, so little time” is one of Aphrodite’s slogans. And while no one could dissuade either Aphrodite or Hestia from the directions their feelings took them, the feelings they followed, while strong, were not necessarily wise.

A Hestia-type woman can become absorbed in the rituals of housework within an unfulfilling or even an abusive marriage. And while meditation or spiritual exercises can help center and deepen a busy life, they can also become opiates that remove you from a healthy participation in life, or numb you to the pain of a life that desperately needs to be changed.

And Aphrodite’s stories show that love may be powerful, but that it is blind. The passion was always consuming, but Aphrodite’s spirit was never known for its wisdom. Among the Aphrodite stories are two where she made a girl fall in love with her father and a mother fall in love with her stepson: both stories had tragic endings. Two modern incarnations of the Aphrodite spirit might be Madonna and J. Lo. In Marilyn Monroe, you could perhaps say that the spirit of Aphrodite was combined with a deadly vulnerability, and the combination was more than Marilyn could hold together.

When you think of these character styles in terms of the ancient Greek goddesses, and then look back over the past fifty years of our country’s history, some surprising patterns emerge, for there have been major shifts in our scripts about what a woman should be over the past few decades.

After World War II, our society strongly endorsed the submissive and compliant roles of daughter, wife and mother for women. Women went to college to get their “M.R.S. Degree” and, once married, often dropped out of school. American women were not stopping at having two children, but were having three, four, five, or six. By 1950 the birthrate in the United States equaled India’s for the first and only time (Jean Shinoda-Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman, pp. 28-29). These were the years of Hera and Demeter.

Twenty years later, the 1970s was the decade of the women’s movement – vintage years for both Artemis and Athena, when feminists and career women took center stage. More women than ever before were now in school, pursuing doctoral, business, medicine, and law degrees. That was the era when the University of Texas Law School was finally opened to blacks, Hispanics and women – by then-Senator Oscar Mauzy, whose wife Ann is still a member of this church. Divorce rates soared and birthrates dropped as ‘independent’ women took the lead, and women whose identities were involved with being a wife and mother found themselves in an increasingly unsupportive climate. Or, to put it another way, our society’s story was changing, and the new script gave a different kind of women’s role the leading part. The roles of wife and mother, which had had the leading parts, were now made into minor characters, or even ridiculed, as overly independent and aggressive women had been made into minor characters and ridiculed just two decades earlier.

Now Artemis styles burst forth with their powerful fury against men’s rules and, often, against men themselves. They burned their bras, they made posters that said ‘woman needs man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ they organized women’s movements to strengthen sisterhood all over the country, and they began working to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

We usually think of the 60s and 70s as the time of women’s liberation movements, by which we mean Artemis-type movements. But what happened in the 60s and 70s was not that simple. It was the rise of women who acted under their own authority, and that includes both the Artemis types of the women’s movement and the Athena types who fought against it and its attack on a status quo in which they had found their own myth to live by, a script in which they seemed to live comfortably. All this is replaying now, coming around again, as mythic themes tend to do, so it’s worth trying to understand it better.

In the 1970s, a nearly archetypal Athena figure appeared. She was a Phi Beta Kappa woman with a master’s degree from Radcliff: a woman named Phyllis Schlafly. Before her leadership of the opposition, ratification of the ERA seemed inevitable. In the first twelve months of its life, the year before Phyllis Schlafly formed her organization called STOP ERA in October 1972, the ERA rolled up ratifications from thirty states. But once Schlafly led her troops into battle, the momentum stopped. In the next eight years, only five more states ratified ‘ and five other states voted to rescind their ratification (Bolen, 82). That’s what an Athena looks like in action, and it is awe-inspiring, even if you’re on the other side.

Framing current events in terms of mythic Greek goddesses is not unavoidably relevant to the real historical events of our times, but it is interesting to note that if the confrontations between those who were for and those who were against the ERA, those who were pro-choice and those who were against it and so on ‘ if these conflicts are seen as confrontations between Artemis and Athena, Artemis would not stand much of a chance. Not even the greatest male heroes of Greece were a match for Athena.

But the lesson I want to draw from seeing the women’s movement as a fundamental change of scripts and myths is a different kind of lesson. What should be most obvious about exalting the characters of only wife, mother and maiden is how woefully inadequate they are by themselves, how incapable of doing justice to the whole range of styles that women carry within them. Without some Artemis, Hestia and Aphrodite, women will be little more than victims and slaves. The pendulum had gone too far to the right, and the women’s movements of the past generation were desperately needed to restore both balance and even humanity to some of the women of this society.

But – all this was politics, not religion. Dividing the goddesses into competing dynamics, siding with one against the other ‘ all this is politics, not religion, and it’s the road to strife, not integration.

There is a very simple definition of the difference between politics and religion. Politics is the conflict between partial visions, in which one partial vision seeks a controlling power over another partial vision. This means that every political victory is at the same time a defeat of our efforts at integration and wholeness. Because empowered partial visions are still only partial visions.

Religion, by definition, has to be the search for a holistic vision, an integrated vision, and a balance between the competing dynamics that are inherent parts of us. In religion, every victory of a partial vision is another form of idolatry: exalting a partial vision to ultimate status. We live in political times, not religious ones. Even the virulent and war-mongering conservative Christians seek power for a very tiny vision – one which Jesus would have detested – rather than seeking the religious vision of oneness, of seeing all people (including Iraqis) as our brothers and sisters. So Christianity has been transformed into a political movement whose very aims are profoundly destructive of any honest religious impulse. It is an irony common to barbarous times.

These seven ancient Greek goddesses represent very different kinds of allegiances, many of them at odds with one another. Superficially, praying to the ancient goddesses could sound like someone is worshiping them, as distant powers. But more deeply, the Greeks were seeking their energies and perspectives, in search of a kind of harmony that transcends all of the goddesses, a kind of harmony that is not within the reach of any one of them.

This is the same kind of harmony that America has lost sight of, and so has lost the ability and the will to seek. It is a harmony that must be a wholly human achievement. We must fashion it. It can be fashioned only by fighting for what we love, but fighting in a way that brings the various parts of our life together, rather than letting any one of them rule us. It was not done in the lifetimes of those who invoked the spirits of the gods and goddesses. It will not be done in our lifetime, or in the lifetime of those who follow. That’s why it is a religious quest, always with us, and a task each person and each new generation must always accomplish for them.

It is what Joseph Campbell once called “the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.” It is the most essential quest of religion, and of life. The gods and goddesses we have created along the way can be clues and guides, and may open us to the better path we need.

But the gods cannot do it for us. It is our task: our task alone, and our task together. Let it be a task that calls us to it, and graces us with the inspiration of the gods – all of them.