At the beginning of the beginning, after almost all other species had been created and received their gifts from the Creator Goddess, humanity stood waiting. Finally, when it was our turn, we slowly walked up to the Creator to receive our special geniuses, which we knew we should faithfully use to improve life on our planet for all the beings every moment of our lives. She leaned closer giving us one gift after the other, till finally She whispered, “This last is maybe the best of all, it is my favorite. It is story. With story you can change the world almost instantly. And every story starts with the one that you tell yourself about yourself. Be sure to make it good.”
And, indeed, every day, we are constructing the story of our lives, shaped by our perceptions, assumptions, doubts, and dreams. During more than a quarter century as a human services professional, I listened to the life stories of hundreds of women and I was always amazed at how often what they said about their disappointment in themselves and their accomplishments belied the truth I knew of long decades of caring and compassion, persisting in the face of overwhelming challenges, creating profound beauty, and being deeply of service to family, friends, and community.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised if I posit that demonizing myths of Goddesses are directly responsible for much of the disconnect between women’s perceptions of themselves and reality. Every one of the myths is a story of how humans perceive ourselves, for good or bad. And, in fact, those myths can profoundly affect our well being, even for those of us who think we have left them far behind years ago. What can we learn by examining the myths that denigrate Goddesses about their effects on the life stories we weave about ourselves and what are the truths we should remember?
Helen of Troy was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, setting all other women up as less worthy on the basis of appearance. Still, Helen’s beauty was not only unattainable by mortal women, but also led to tragedy. She was reviled by many in ancient Greek society because, in their eyes, her crossing of the Greek sexual double-standard started the Trojan War, leading to immense suffering and death1. And thus we learned not only that our bodies were not up to Helen’s standards but that, if they had been, disaster would still result. Truth: All of our bodies are beautiful in their own unique way and deserve to be nurtured and nourished by us and those around us.
The Sumerian and Hebrew goddess Lilith has long been portrayed as a warning about women’s lust when she was tossed out of Paradise for demanding sexual equality with Adam, and then becoming insatiable2. And thus we learned that our physical creative power and pleasure are evil and uncontrollable. Truth: Our sexuality is our own to enjoy as we please.
We are told over and over again that as our bodies age, we become ugly or invisible. Baba Yaga, similar to many crone Goddesses, is envisioned as a disfigured old woman who scares people to death by looking at them and then devours her victims3. And thus we learned that we are worthless unless young and our life lessons have given us nothing to offer ourselves or society. Truth: Our life experiences are the source of our ability to live wisely and give effective counsel.
Now let’s look at Eve. She has been portrayed for millennia as evil because of her pursuit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, leading to the sometimes fatal demonization and persecution of women4 as responsible for all the troubles of the world. We see a similar message in the story of Inanna who descends to the Underworld out of compassion for her newly widowed sister and to seek the power and discernment that can only come from confronting our own mortality. There she is stripped of her clothes and symbols of her station, judged, executed, and hung on a meathook for three days. Her servant, Ninshubur, appeals to Inanna’s father and grandfather for help. They refuse because, according to Diane Wolkstein, they “are angry that Inanna should pursue a direction that is different from theirs”5. And thus we learned to quell our natural instinct to understand ourselves and our world so that we can fill our life missions. Truth: It is our essential birthright to pursue truth and wisdom.
And there are many more.
When we analyze these myths, we see why certain aspects of our being are singled out for criticism by those who would seek for women to be less than they deserve to be. Each of these relates in some way to women’s power over herself and her ability to be an effective force for positive change in the world. Fortunately, these are not the original myths told about these Goddesses and we, as a generation, have begun to excavate these older myths that speak the truth and bring them back into humanity’s awareness.
Max Dashu reminds us that the maligned Helen was originally a Goddess, whose name was possibly related to the sun and light and a relief shows her wearing a “a radiant sun-crown”6. The people did not demonize Helen; she had “heroine shrines” where they left offerings of “votive figurines of warriors, female musicians, dancers and riders; ivory combs, cosmetics, mirrors, perfume”7.
The first mention of Lilith is the Sumerian myth of Inanna where she comes to live in Inanna’s huluppu tree of life but is eventually forced to flee into the wilderness. Elinor Gadon wrote that this Lilith was “probably originally a form of the Goddess now threatening to patriarchy”8. In later Sumerian texts she is a bird goddess who bears the symbols of Sumerian royal authority9. Later, Assyrian women chanted a prayer to her in the form of a winged phoenix for help in giving birth10. Again, we find that a goddess eventually used to repress women, in fact, has her origins in sovereignty and life-giving.
Baba Yaga was, according to Patricia Monaghan, a “seasonal divinity (who) lived in the last sheaf of grain harvested annually and the woman who bound it would bear a child that year”11 and “behind this fierce legend looms the figure of the ancient birth-and-death goddess, one whose autumn death in the cornfield led to a new birth in the spring”12. Old women are not useless, after all, but the very spirit of life’s regeneration.
Finally, Caitlin Matthews notes that Eve’s name as she leaves Paradise, Hahwah, is similar to the Aramaic word for serpent. “The serpent may be seen as the voice of the Black Goddess, the voice of the earth’s motherwit, Eve’s daemon, not her demon”13. As for Inanna, though her father and grandfather refuse to help her, her other grandfather saves her because, Diane Wolkstein says, he values “the journey she has set out upon” and remembers her “significance”14. He and Inanna alone see that only by pursuing the wisdom of life and death can Inanna reach her full potential and wholeness as a Goddess, just as we must sometimes journey to our own Underworld to attain transformation.
Stop for a moment and think of your own life story, maybe as if for the first time, perhaps from the perspective of someone who knows you well. What do you see? Are there elements of the first kind of myth, venomous in its portrayal of women, that you can turn into aspects of the original myths, radiant, vibrant, and full of love and possibility?
We are the first generation to face not only the existential crisis of worldwide environmental destruction, but also the task of restoring ourselves as individuals, as a global community, and a planet from the wounding of millennia of violence, fear, and hatred. We need our good and true stories of ourselves at this moment in history. Remember that your story is not yours alone, but fits perfectly into the Matrix of Life, that shining multi-faceted jewel containing the stories of all living beings who ever were and will ever be. How you tell your story has an effect on all the other stories, either healing or being an obstacle to wholeness. If we underestimate ourselves we cannot do what we need to do; we will not be able to envision our ability to do all that is necessary.
But how can I transform my own story of myself? When I look at the two sets of myths, the essential difference is that the original myths assume the sacredness of the Goddesses whereas the demonizing myths objectify the Goddesses as simply to be criticized. And so, too, when we seek to create life stories for ourselves and others in order to build the kind of world we would like our descendants to live in, we need to start from a center of sacredness and then rewrite our stories through the lenses of grace, forgiveness, joy, and celebration.
Perhaps most essentially, when you make your stories of yourself, think about how Goddess sees you, She who is both outside our limitations or time and space and can witness us from the broadest perspective; She who is within us all and can see the complete and intimate truth. Now tell your life’s true story for yourself and all those who you encounter. Be sure to make it good.
Sources:
Dashu, Max. Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Mellissae and Titanides. Richmond, CA: Veleda Press, 2023.
Gadon, Elinor. The Once and Future Goddess. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1989.
Matthews, Caitlin. Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom. London: Harper Collins, 1992.
Monaghan, Patricia. Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2014.
Monaghan, Patricia. New Book of Goddesses and Heroines. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1989.
Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1983.
- Dashu, Women in Greek Mythography, 86. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 196-197. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 65. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 120. ↩︎
- Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, 159. ↩︎
- Dashu, Women in Greek Mythography, 92. ↩︎
- Dashu, Women in Greek Mythography, 92. ↩︎
- Gadon, Once and Future Goddess, 122. ↩︎
- Gadon, Once and Future Goddess, 123. ↩︎
- Gadon, Once and Future Goddess, 125. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 65. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 65. ↩︎
- Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, 223. ↩︎
- Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, 160. ↩︎
So true, Sara. I didn’t have space to write much about each Goddess, but what I love about these in particular is that they each have complex stories that include all aspects of life. While I focused on Inanna’s pursuit of self-knowledge for the purposes of the post, Inanna’s descent is one of the great stories of going within to confront death and our shadow selves, for example. This reminds me of a wonderful quote from Madeleine L’Engle I recently came across about how you must have experienced sorrow to truly understand and experience the complex emotion of joy. “Not mere happiness. Joy. Someone told me that the difference between happiness and joy is sorrow.”
On Seeing Ourselves… Carolyn Boyd. I think the goddess myths like fairy tales carry truths that as women we need desperately to be in touch with in order to live our lives with integrity – privileging truth and honesty with oneself over fantasy. As much as I would love to have all my stories be stories of celebration and joy I am as a dear friend just told me ‘Grounded in What is Real’ so some of those stories are dark ones. And at these times are dark goddesses are friends indeed.