“Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places.”
— Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
All posts by Joanna
Viewer’s Guide to the New Superman Preview, FAQ
Q: Really? A comic book movie? Haven’t you seen the news lately? I think we have more important matters to discuss.
A: It’s because of the news that we need to talk about this preview.
Q: Come on. Comics aren’t real. They’re imaginary.
A: You want to change what’s going on anywhere, ever? Or change anything about your life? First you’ll need to dream up new possibilities. That requires imagining them before putting them into action. Imagination is essential for creativity.
Q: But comics oversimplify everything. The real world is messier. There’s no such thing as a hero or villain.
A: There’s no such thing as a person who is always a hero or villain, and there are infinite ways and degrees of being heroic and villainous, but heroism and villainy both exist. Fiction’s technique of exaggeration makes it easier to recognize these realities.
Q: This is a two-minute movie preview. How could it possibly matter?
A: Because Superman is a metaphor for the United States. He’s a personification of the country, and so he gives us a way to imagine our collective self. Here, watch the preview, then we’ll talk more.
Q: Ok that was pretty good.
A: Pretty good? It was fantastic! But see how Superman represents the USA? He’s big, he’s strong, he wears red and blue. He’s dedicated to truth, justice, and the American way, meaning ever-expanding if imperfect democracy. He’s also white and male, two traits which have dominated the national culture since day one.
When the preview opens Superman plummets down onto a barren snowscape, grievously wounded. He’s paralyzed, bleeding, barely able to breathe. Lying helpless in the snow, he is our damage, our trauma. A mournful rendition of the John Williams Superman theme music from 1978 plays in what sounds like a minor key, giving voice to the nation’s failures, disappointments, dashed dreams.
Then the scene changes to Lois Lane and Clark Kent meeting for the first time in the offices of a newspaper called The Daily Planet. In other words, they are citizens of the world dedicated to telling the truth, exposing evil, and also selling newspapers. The first time he sees her, Clark looks up at Lois, which is a sign of respect, looking up to someone else. This is an image of a man seeing and honoring a woman for who she is: smart, capable, confident.
We cut back to Superman immobilized in the snow. He manages to whistle, and who comes running at super-speed but the utterly winsome Krypto the Superdog. Krypto is an image of the nation’s soul. He represents our capacity for many blessings: love, loyalty, connection. Happiness, strength, stamina. Courage, companionship, the ability to play. The soul responds to the slightest summons. And where does Superman need Krypto to take him? Home. Home to himself, or his deeper nature before everything went sideways. Krypto accepts this task with exuberance and good cheer, dragging Superman through the snow by his red cape.
The scene flashes to Superman saving a young girl from an explosion by shielding her with his own body. We can protect the vulnerable. We can value the feminine.
And then, Lex Luthor. The evil billionaire CEO on a self-obsessed crime spree against whom Superman—our strength, our democracy, our values—is our only hope. Luthor’s evil is a foil for Superman, showing that Superman not only represents the nation, but also the nation’s best self. Luthor is the antagonist who forces Superman—us—to level up our soul game.
Q: Come on, not all CEOs are evil.
A: Well this one is and at the moment he’s the one we have to deal with.
The preview’s images continue: Superman contained in a jail with clear walls, meaning the country’s best self is held back by invisible barriers. A little boy in a war-torn desert raising a battered yellow Superman flag, closing his eyes, and repeating, “Superman, Superman” as though praying—the call of the innocents to our better selves, our sacred nature. Then Superman breaks out of the jail—our best self exerts its strength to be free.
A mob of angry Americans turns on Superman like a tragic autoimmune disease. In their pain and frustration, they mistakenly direct their fury at the country—the collective forces that build roads, put out fires, and fund cancer research—instead of at the billionaire interests that bleed the people dry. The mob has clearly been misled and no longer recognizes reality, even as a fire-breathing Godzilla-like monster tries to destroy the city, i.e. the culture, exactly the way a fascist coup would do.
Other superheroes whose names I don’t know swoop in, clearly illustrating the benefits of coalition and vibrant diversity. Finally Superman and Lois Lane embrace. A simple human hug, no superpowers needed, just a heartfelt connection between two Earth dwellers who care for each other.
Q: But so what? What am I supposed to do with all these metaphors?
A: The USA has done heroic things. In the 1770s we fought for the right to make our own laws. In the 1860s we fought ourselves to end the scourge of slavery. In the 1940s we fought fascism to end World War II. But we’ve also done horrible things. We committed genocide against Indigenous nations, we enslaved generations of Black people, we caused mass suffering in pointless wars from Vietnam to Iraq, we never fully addressed the racism that gave rise to slavery in the first place. And now evil forces have invaded the government to dismantle the democracy our forebears worked so hard to create.
I hear a collective invitation in this preview to make like Superman and return home to our true selves in order to heal, build our strength, and get heroic once again. I think we have to reckon with our whole selves—our history and our potential—in order to summon up our best selves each in our own way, in our own communities, and all over the nation.
“If we begin to value our creative urges…”
“If we begin to value our creative urges, we begin to value ourselves…. We can develop, too, a sense of faith in a higher creative power, as Henry Miller did, one that will generously provide everything we need to do this project.”
— Louise DeSalvo in Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives
Americans in Normandy
Last fall I traveled from Normandy, France, to Paris in the back of a bus with a view out over the French countryside. The green fields and hedges looked peaceful in the quiet morning, but only eighty years earlier war raged over that land. The battle scenes were easy to imagine because I’d spent the previous days visiting beaches and towns where Allied forces began the fearsome work of liberating France from Hitler’s brutal, four-year occupation, in order to liberate survivors from Germany’s inconceivably brutal concentration camps.
Museum exhibits and cemeteries for fallen soldiers served as vivid reminders of the scale of Nazi cruelty and cowardice, and of the Allies’ courage and resolve. The numbers were mind-boggling: 90,000 French children lost in the German invasion of France, 1.4 million Jewish children in the Holocaust, 73,000 Americans swooping in on D-Day as part of the Allied force of 160,000.
I found one museum’s recreation of Hitler’s rise to power especially chilling—how he manipulated people with his charisma and narcissism, how he was such a damaged person, how his damage caused so much damage to so many other people.
Hitler rejected the proposition that we are all created equal. Instead, he maximized power for a self-absorbed few by restricting freedom and opportunity for everyone else. He committed physical and psychological violence to strip rights, well-being, and life away from people who were already marginalized: Jewish people, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and many others.
But Normandy also reminded me of those who stand up for humanity—the leaders, soldiers, and citizens with the courage to step forward to block the abuses of bullies and tyrants. “No,” the defenders say in words and deeds. “You may not treat people that way. Get your hands off our human family.” To stand up to bullies is to stand for freedom and equality.
Shrines of gratitude line the Normandy coast, honoring what our nation gave to push back the Nazis. France remains palpably thankful to us for sending thousands of our brave, beautiful young soldiers to storm the beaches then fight through German bullets and bunkers—beach by beach, town by town—bleeding and dying for the sake of French freedom. I felt grateful, too, and I gained a new sense of a uniquely American determination that arrived on French soil in 1944: playfulness rooted in liberty, courage born from caring, jaunty effervescence bubbling up from a spring of justice and equality. That’s the American spirit I envision rising up in the face of oppression, repudiating hatred and claiming power for the people.
The morning before my bus ride to Paris, I visited the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer on a bluff overlooking the English Channel where a fleet of warships once massed. In the center of the graves stood a round chapel with a carved inscription wrapping its wall:
THESE ENDURED ALL AND GAVE ALL THAT JUSTICE AMONG NATIONS MIGHT PREVAIL AND THAT MANKIND MIGHT ENJOY FREEDOM AND PEACE
Row upon perfect row of graves, the golden morning light, cool air with a hint of a breeze like a wink and a grin from a cheeky young ghost—it all gave me hope that enough of us have learned the lessons of the past to stand and defend when we need to. There are things worth fighting for, such as the self-evident truth that we are all created equal. We’re all different but we’re equal in value, and it matters how we show up for each other.
My latest updates
New blog posts
Viewer’s Guide to the New Superman Preview, FAQ
Q: Really? A comic book movie? Haven’t you seen the news lately? I think we have more important matters to discuss.
A: It’s because of the news that we need to talk about this preview….
Americans in Normandy
Last year I visited the beaches of Normandy which wound up feeling like a pilgrimage to a sacred site. History felt superimposed over the present, and I was shocked at how the experience deepened my love for France and the USA. It also reminded me how and—most importantly—why to deny fascists their murderous impulses. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post I wrote about it:
But Normandy also reminded me of those who stand up for humanity—the leaders, soldiers, and citizens with the courage to step forward to block the abuses of bullies and tyrants. “No,” the defenders say in words and deeds. “You may not treat people that way. Get your hands off our human family.” To stand up to bullies is to stand for freedom and equality. …
Myth Lit webinar with Maureen Murdock
I’m so excited to host Maureen Murdock at the next Fates and Graces Myth Lit webinar, where we’ll discuss her book Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir. We’ll talk about how to tell our stories in a mythic way and why it’s so important to bear witness to our experience and the world around us.
New MythBlast: The Divine Mayhem of What’s Up, Doc?
The Joseph Campbell Foundation‘s theme this year is The Power of Myth at the Movies, and my first MythBlast on that topic is now available. Here’s how it begins:
In 1972, a ridiculous comedy called What’s Up, Doc? burst into theaters like a pack of drunken puppies, leaving audiences across the country weak and wheezing from the film’s hilarity. I didn’t see What’s Up, Doc? until the 1980s, after video rentals became a thing, but the movie’s raucously impetuous brand of humor was precisely calibrated to my adolescent sensibilities…
My latest book: The Practice of Enchantment
Thank you to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for publishing my book, The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024. Inspired by the work of Joseph Campbell, these essays are about how myth enlivens and enchants everyday life.
Here’s a reading from the book I shared at the Fates and Graces Myth Lit webinar about the book:
Surprise! A newsletter!
Once a month I send an email to subscribers such as yourself with my recent recommendations for books and articles about myth, creativity, and creative inspiration, plus my upcoming courses, publications, and events. If that sounds like your cuppa tea (or coffee or other delightful beverage), please subscribe!
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“I dwell in Possibility —…”
“I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —”
— Emily Dickinson #657
Practicing Enchantment
I am so grateful to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for publishing my book, The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024. Thank you, JCF!
This book is a collection of fourteen short essays I wrote for the Foundation about how myth and the work of Joseph Campbell enchant my life.
I define enchantment as the feelings that accompany experiences of fun, blessing, luck, charm, beauty, awe, and wonder. To maximize enchantment, however, those feelings require attention, appreciation, and amplification. Enchantment doesn’t necessarily happen by itself. It takes practice.
My enchantment practices
I titled The Practice of Enchantment long after I wrote most of the book. The phrase had been in my mind for awhile, but I didn’t think it would find its way onto a collection of personal, myth-focused essays. The more I thought about it though, the more the title seemed appropriate in a poetic kind of way.
Then I realized that there actually is a practice implicit in these essays. First, I notice something awe-inspiring or amazing or mythic or beautiful—whatever catches my attention for any reason at all. Second, I write about it, meaning I re-enter the experience through imagination, myth, and creativity.
For more along those lines, here’s the recording of a webinar the Foundation hosted about The Practice of Enchantment. There’s good stuff all the way through the video, but the enchantment section begins at 26:45 and includes a reading I did from the book.
Your invitation to enchantment
Enchantment takes practice. And the more difficult it is to practice, the more important it is to try. Difficult experiences have the most to teach and potentially the greatest reward as a result of enchanting them.
Even for people blessed with extraordinary good fortune, enchantment is not a foregone conclusion. Lucky people face the same questions around mortality, meaning, and purpose as anyone else. And I have yet to meet anyone for whom enchantment is perfectly continuous. We practice, we mess up, we practice some more. But the thrill of the times when enchantment works can be wonderful enough to carry you through the setbacks.
Practice with me!
I hope The Practice of Enchantment will sail out into what can seem like a disenchanted world and help readers like yourself strengthen your own personal practices of enchantment.
Enchantment is intensely personal. I can share how I practice, but it’s up to you to craft your own approach. What works for me might resonate with you and give you ideas to try, or it might not. That’s great! It’s all information.
So I’ll write blog posts here on my website, post articles I find enchanting on Bluesky, and email reflections and reading recommendations in my monthly newsletter, to which you can subscribe here. I hope you’ll join me in the practice in whatever ways work best for you!
“Great art and great science involve…”
“Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology
of Discovery and Invention
The Goddess Mythology of Stranger Things
HERE BE SPOILERS!
This post has been rated DO NOT READ if you have not seen seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things. If that’s the case, I urge you to hasten over to Netflix and let the binge begin.
Contents
You can read this post straight through or jump ahead to any section.
- I spy with my mythic eye
- Fictional women, real problems
- A glory of goddesses
- The greatest goddess of them all
- Goddess, meet patriarch
- “Monster” means “one who warns”
- A goddess mythology needs an underworld
- Goddess heroes fight the patriarchy
- An 80s do-over, this time with goddesses
- Pop songs as goddess hymns
- The goddess says, Don’t be a stranger
I spy with my mythic eye
I’ll say it right here: the Netflix series Stranger Things creates a goddess mythology centered on the sacred feminine.
I won’t dwell on the show’s images from Greek myth (Steve Harrington’s liver pecked like Prometheus, Victor Creel blinding himself like Oedipus, Eddie Munson’s Orpheus moment playing a guitar solo in the Upside Down).
Nor will I examine religious allusions such as One/Henry/Vecna as the beautiful first son who is cast down into the hell of the Upside Down which only increases his power—no! I’m not going to talk about any of that.
Instead, let’s talk about how Stranger Things works as a myth in its own right, one that honors the feminine divine.
Fictional women, real problems
When I first started watching Stranger Things, I felt dismay at the female characters. They seemed weak and whiny, devalued and dismissed by their male companions. Here we go, I thought, another show by men about men for men, where women function as narrative props.
Gradually, however, I realized something else was going on. These female characters wore normal clothes that fully covered their bodies. They spent little time styling their hair, didn’t use much make-up, and navigated age-appropriate feelings and experiences around sexuality. They seemed like real, complex people with minds, hearts, and bodies of their own, and some of the men in their lives were honestly trying to figure out how to create relationships with them. In other words, this was the opposite of sexist objectification.
Not only that, Joyce’s son had gone missing. Barb was taken by the demogorgon. Nancy lost her best friend. El was traumatized, cold, alone, unhoused, and so socially malformed that she could barely speak. Stranger Things was spotlighting women dealing with extremely difficult situations imposed on them by outside forces.
What’s more, the problems these characters faced all arose, one way or another, from patriarchal systems of oppression. And male characters who treated women as lesser beings—Papa, Billy, the jerks at the newspaper office—were portrayed as some combination of wounded, evil, and tragic. Stranger Things was showing the impact of patriarchy on women.
A glory of goddesses
But there was another layer at play, too. Many of these normal-looking female characters had more-than-normal traits, which clearly signaled the presence of divinity. That means Stranger Things offers an opportunity to apply the Gardner Goddess Quiz for uncovering the sacred feminine. Here’s how some characters score on the quiz, with a score of one indicating no goddess attributes at all, and six meaning gigawatt goddess energies.
- Speaking about Mrs. Sinclair, Mr. Sinclair tells his son Lucas, “She’s never wrong, son,” in an elegant moment of fathering his child, husbanding his partner, and honoring the feminine divine, who is, of course, never wrong. Mrs. Sinclair’s goddess score: 2.
- Max Mayfield possesses the powers of beating the boys at video games, riding skateboards, and driving sports cars without a license, and she ventures willingly into Vecna’s mental hellscape to distract the monster so her friends can mount their attack. Max’s goddess score: 3.
- Joyce Byers refuses to be ignored, denied, or gaslit, and instead trusts her own truth no matter what anyone else thinks. Plus, her maternal commitment to saving Will is elemental. Joyce’s goddess score: 3.
Then there’s Suzie, the genius who meets Dustin at science camp. When Dustin tells the group about how supernaturally brilliant and beautiful Suzie is, they doubt she actually exists—much the way people doubt that goddesses exist.
Suzie, however, like goddess energies, does indeed exist, and she responds to Dustin’s call right when the world needs her most. The Russians are about to open a gate to the Upside Down. Hopper and Joyce need Planck’s constant to access the Russian control room, so Dustin calls Suzie on the ham radio. Of course she knows Planck’s constant; the goddess knows the workings of the universe. But before she divulges this information, she requires an offering of music from her supplicant, Dustin. More about that scene in a minute. Suzie’s goddess score: 5.
The greatest goddess of them all
But the most powerful goddess in Stranger Things is, obviously, El. El moves objects with her mind. She psychically travels into the minds of others. She brings Max back from the dead, much like other deities of whom you may have heard. And “El” is an ancient word that means “god” or “deity.”
She also needs a bath of salt water at body temperature for her powers to work at peak efficiency. In other words, she needs a womb-like tank of amniotic fluid. Her divinity derives from a maternal influence.
“You’re bigger than Madonna to them,” Dr. Owens tells El when scientists gape at her in wonderment. The double meaning here suggests that El is bigger than the Madonna, the Virgin Mary. He continues in this religious language: “They believe in the cause. They believe in you.”
Henry/One also tells El he believes in her, and then, when El is about to die inside Vecna’s mind, crucified over a stained-glass window of a rose (to drive home the imagery of the sacred feminine), Mike calls to her from the everyday world.
“El, El, El,” his voice echoes across the dimensions as he addresses the deity. “I love you! I love you!… You can do anything! You can fly, you can move mountains, I believe that, I really do!” This is more than a boyfriend’s encouragement. This is a prayer to a goddess, and it’s a beautiful image of how prayer works within the psyche, summoning and activating otherwise inaccessible powers.
El’s goddess score: an emphatic 6.
Goddess, meet patriarch
But El is traumatized. The patriarchy, in the form of the towering psychopath Dr. Brenner, took her from her mother. Held El captive. Experimented on her. Conditioned her to obey and to call Dr. Brenner “Papa”—a cute little nickname for pa-pa-pa-patriarchy.
As his name suggests, everything Papa is, says, and does represents the patriarchy. When Papa electroshocks El’s mother Terry, the patriarchy silences the great mother. When Papa imprisons El, the patriarchy locks up the feminine divine. When Papa tells her he knows what’s best for her, the patriarchy is trying to train goddess energies to submit, behave, and question their own instincts and wisdom.
The patriarchy is the sum of all the social structures that keep women subordinate to men. But those structures also make it difficult for men to relate to anyone except other men, including children, women, and those who don’t fit patriarch-prescribed gender norms and sexuality.
Think of Lonnie, the absent father of Will and Jonathan. Ted, the oblivious father of Mike and Nancy. Max’s step-dad, a brute of an abuser. These fathers are too conditioned by the system that wounds women—and everyone else—to let them to be present for anyone else.
“Monster” means “one who warns”
In Stranger Things, monsters take many forms: demogorgon, demo-dogs, demo-bats, a massive spider-shaped shadow monster, a gleefully gory giant spider made of goo, the evil wizard Vecna, Papa, governmental systems of control. Many kinds of monster means many metaphors for the challenges of life.
And these forces of evil have some interesting messages. Zombies and the giant goo spider stomping around the mall speak of the mindless, destructive aspects of capitalism. Vecna muses, not inaccurately, about the toxic nature of human civilization. Papa says to El, “You speak of monsters, superheroes. That’s the stuff of myth and fairy tales. Reality, truth, is rarely so simple. People are not so easily defined. Only by facing all of ourselves, the good and the bad, can we become whole.”
Papa’s words sound reasonable, but they can also slide all too quickly into moral relativism. To deny the existence of monsters and heroes could also deny the monstrous and the heroic. The monstrous and heroic exist in fiction because the monstrous and heroic exist in life. And despite Papa’s words, he is a monster: a narcissist drunk on power who wants to imprison the feminine divine.
The word “monster” comes from roots that mean “one who warns.” Some of the warnings Stranger Things monsters deliver: There are scary things in the world and in our minds. Sometimes fear can gain the upper hand. But not always.
A goddess mythology needs an underworld
No goddess mythology is complete without at least one underworld journey, and Stranger Things has many. Most of them happen in the Upside Down.
The Upside Down is a shadow-realm below the everyday world. It’s an alternate dimension and a mirror image of the reality we know. Both worlds contain the same objects—roads, buildings, bikes—but the Upside Down is stuck in a decaying version of the past. There’s no sunlight or water. There are monsters, however, and slimy, twining vines that choke the life out of anyone they capture. Pale flakes float in the air like glowing nuclear ash.
Humans can visit this realm, but they can’t live there. Not for long. Sometimes, like Will, they get stuck there, like getting stuck in anxiety or depression.
The Upside Down holds power and fear. It’s a place where uncomfortable feelings and memories live, such as shame, guilt, and trauma. Like the subconscious, it’s a place to confront the forces that hold you back. It’s also similar to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, because it affects everyone, and everyone can visit it. It’s personal and collective, both at once.
Will’s abduction into the Upside Down is another metaphor of the damage the patriarchy inflicts on those who don’t conform to its rules—people such as sensitive, creative, young gay men. No, patriarchy says, you can’t be who you are or we will hurt you. Then terror sends the soul tumbling into the depths where it suffers despair, paralysis, cold, creative starvation, and loneliness. That kind of soul needs the help of friends and goddess energies to make the return trip.
Goddess heroes fight the patriarchy
Which brings us to Sheriff Jim Hopper. Hopper wants to be a father to El and a lover to Joyce, but his stumbling attempts to connect show how difficult the patriarchy makes relationships for men.
In many ways, Hopper reminds me of my dad in the 80s. The functional, unlovely work clothes. The ramming around town in a lunky truck that smells like sweat, motor oil, and fast-food wrappers. Collapsing in front of the television every night after work. The default air of simmering frustration which sometimes boils over in an angry outburst.
Hopper, however, goes to war against the patriarchy. First, he commits the heretical act of believing Joyce, when the system wants her silenced. Then he fights monsters and Russians alongside the rest of the group, until the fateful explosion of the Russian machine.
That’s when it seems like the patriarchy won.
After Hopper disappears, everyone believes he’s dead. They hold a funeral.
But actually the Russians have taken him, injured but alive, to the living hell (another underworld) of a Siberian work prison, where he suffers horribly and must die to (let go of) almost everything about his former self: name, occupation, language, hair, weight. The only thing he holds onto is his love for El and Joyce. That’s enough to keep his soul alive and enable his rebirth, newly able to love and be loved, having shed the patriarchal conditioning that held him back.
Even though my dad didn’t do any of that, Hopper’s transformation lets me imagine Dad shedding his anger, his defenses. Opening up to the family he worked so hard to support. Relaxing, laughing, talking things over. I can’t change the past, but I can change my imaginings about the past, which can change my feelings about it. Hopper helps that happen.
An 80s do-over, this time with goddesses
Stranger Things lets me relive the 80s in many ways—Trapper Keepers, Lite Brite, riding around in the way-back of a station wagon—but this time in the company of goddesses and lovable, monster-fighting nerds who, after a little initial skepticism, never question when someone says they saw a demogorgon or an evil spider wizard.
The patriarchy thrives on doubting, devaluing, and dismissing people who don’t fit the system until those people learn to doubt, devalue and dismiss themselves. That’s how the system keeps going.
But in Stranger Things, our band of intrepids believe each other and believe in each other. They forgive each other’s trespasses, and are never really happy until they’re reunited.
This goddess-powered version of the decade makes my memories feel more real, more valid, more handle-able. It helps me accept and appreciate things about my youth that I used to reject and deny—and we all know how well that works.
Pop songs as goddess hymns
One of my favorite aspects of this 80s replay is how Stranger Things turns the decade’s music into something sacred. Peter Gabriel’s “Heroes” captures the pathos of saying yes to the adventure and failing. “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” becomes Hopper’s personal anthem of triumph and tragedy. “Runnin’ Up That Hill” holds so much of Max’s vast courage and sorrow that it opens a portal from Vecna’s mental hell for her to return to the world of love and friendship.
And then there’s the soundtrack to The Never-Ending Story, which Suzie requires Dustin to sing over the walkie-talkie before she’ll share Planck’s constant.
Turn around, Dustin sings, haltingly at first, as the rest of the party does in fact turn—Murray in the boiler room of the Russian base, Hopper at the control room door, Robin and Steve in the back of the station wagon as it speeds away from the thundering goo monster. Look at what you see-ee-ee-ee… in her face, the mirror of your drea-ea-ea-eams—et voilà, the goddess is summoned.
Make believe I’m everywhere, Suzie joins in, because when you sing to a goddess, she’ll sing along with you—given in the light—and she’ll remind you where and how to find her.
The two of them continue their duet, so hauntingly true that everyone else experiences that shared beauty as well, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Even smart-aleck Erica is transfixed, sitting on the hilltop with Dustin in the light of a full moon—a highly appropriate place to sing a hymn to a goddess.
The goddess says, Don’t be a stranger
There are stories in my life I return to again and again, stories I revel in. Stranger Things has joined that list. This fascination must mean the show has things to teach me, that it functions with the force of myth in my psyche.
In case it isn’t already clear, I no longer feel dismay at the characters in Stranger Things. Now it’s more like charm and delight. And I wonder, is this how the Greeks felt about their pantheon? Did they adore their goddesses and gods? Did people sit around re-telling those tales simply for the joy of returning to the company of their favorite characters?
I’ve heard some viewers object to the show’s scary, violent scenes, and I get it. Those scenes are hard to watch. But patriarchy is scary and violent. Patriarchy spawns monsters, devours lives, silences more than it supports. Stranger Things shows that reality metaphorically in order to say things don’t have to be that way. We can fight back. We can call on goddess energies. We can change.
By presenting a cast of characters with a range of powers, the show also says, “You have powers, too. How will you use them? How will you team up? Given the horrors of life, how will you not be a stranger?” Then it answers:
Believe each other. Believe in each other. Fight those monsters together.
“In the form and function of play…”
“In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”
– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 17-18
A Bechdel Test for Goddesses
Some religious traditions imagine divinity as male, rejecting all goddess figures.
In my experience, this approach overvalues traditionally masculine traits and undervalues those that have traditionally been seen as feminine. It also results in some nasty internalized misogyny on the part of all genders. To reject the feminine divine is to reject important parts of everyone’s souls.
But goddess energies don’t go away just because the patriarchy wants them to. Goddesses still appear in movies, shows, and other media, but disguised in forms other than literal deities. These hidden goddesses function as metaphors for actual goddesses, who in turn function as metaphors for the sacred nature of the universe.
To spot these goddess dynamics in the wild, it helps to have a few guidelines.
With gratitude to Alison Bechdel
I’m following in the footsteps of the Bechdel Test here. In 1985, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel proposed three questions about a film or show or comic book to determine its level of gender representation:
- Are there two or more women? If yes, then:
- Do they ever speak to each other? If yes, then:
- Do they discuss something other than a man? If yes, then the work in question has achieved a bare minimum, baseline level of representation.
That’s it. That’s the whole Bechdel Test. If the answer to any of these questions is no, then the work has failed to reach anything resembling gender equality.
The Gardner Goddess Quiz
The Bechdel Test, useful though it is, doesn’t indicate whether media achieves goddess representation. In other words, does a given character portray the sacred feminine, and if so, how strongly?
So here’s a similar test for goddesses. These are the questions I ask to determine the presence or absence of the feminine divine:
- Is the character a girl/woman or girlish/womanly—including cis, trans, and gender-fluid people? If yes, continue. If no, they might represent divinity, but probably not the sacred feminine.
- Is this character royalty or of noble or unusual parentage? For example, queens, princesses, heiresses.
- Is this character inherently exceptional in any way, such as extreme beauty, ugliness, tallness, shortness, or anything else? In other words, was this character born special?
- Does the character possess an unusual skill, talent, or power? From an invisible jet to a magic wand to the ability to prophesy, has this character gained special attributes since they were born?
- Does the character’s name or title contain any words that refer to divinity or high status? Examples: godmother, Venus, Princess Diana.
- Does the character have other traits or possessions in common with any traditional deities? Think of Aphrodite’s magic wrap, Durga’s tiger, Hestia’s sacred hearth and flame.
To score the quiz, every yes equals one point. The more points a character gets, the more they embody the feminine divine.
One point means the sacred feminine is absent, and we are in the realm of the mundane. Two to five points means mighty metaphors are at play. Six points means buckle up for some serious goddess hijinks.
Why goddess equality?
Why spend time and energy watching for hidden goddesses?
For so many reasons.
To bring them out into the open. To counteract the internalized misogyny that keeps everyone cut off from their full selves. To celebrate sacred goddess energies, which include fertility, childbirth, love, death, war, hunting, healing, animals, and many other cosmic forces. To gain more access to those energies in my life, and hopefully make it easier for others to do the same.
“When women learn to see the world as it truly is…”
“When women learn to see the world as it truly is, without prejudice, and apply their skills of ‘women’s work’ to cleaning up the mess and choosing what will live and what will die, they manifest the Great Goddess in both her destructive and her nurturing aspects. No one who comes face to face with the totality of her power leaves unscathed.”
— Jody Bower, Jane Eyre’s Sisters:
How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story
Haha Learns to Laugh Again
Burnout and Recovery in Laura Lewis-Barr’s “Dumpling”
**Spoiler alert!** At the 2023 Fates and Graces Mythologium, Laura Lewis-Barr shared a presentation about her films, “The Inner Child at Play: Using Fairy Tale Stop Motion Films in Inner Work.” This post analyzes one of those films, “Dumpling.” To avoid spoilers, you can watch the film here before reading.
The woman who used to laugh
Laura Lewis-Barr’s 8-minute film “Dumpling” tells the story of a woman named Haha who has a gift for cooking. At the beginning of the movie, we know two things about Haha: her family calls her Haha because she used to laugh so much, and she loves to cook dumplings.
But when the film begins, Haha isn’t laughing anymore. Instead, she spends her dwindling energy and resources making dumplings for an insatiable throng of visitors. In other words, she uses her creative skills for the nourishment of others, not herself. She wears herself out so others can eat, and she never asks for anything in return. She doesn’t even feed herself. In this state of hunger and exhaustion, Haha is barely surviving in body or soul. She is merely subsisting in a state of burnout.
Haha’s metaphors
The spare quality of the story in “Dumpling” spotlights the psychological metaphors at play. We don’t know much about Haha at the beginning, but we know laughter, cooking, and dumplings are very important to her. Each of these images suggests a deep well of meaning.
Laughing, for example, is a spontaneous, physical release of delight. Haha’s ability to laugh represents her connection with her bodily self, her authentic spontaneity, her innate capacity for joy.
Similarly, cooking is a metaphor for the alchemical art of turning raw, indigestible ingredients into an experience of delicious nourishment. Psychologically, cooking represents the work of turning raw traits and talents into an integrated, balanced personality. This work takes time, care, practice, and patience.
Cooking can also be an art form, a means of creative expression, and Haha’s dumplings are her creative products. They are the physical manifestations of her innate talent and skill, honed by the time she spent practicing her craft. Haha’s dumplings are indeed special: they’re “almost perfect,” the film tells us. But feeding her dumplings to visitors with no reciprocal exchange of energy means Haha has bargained away her creativity, perhaps in the hopes of approval or acceptance.
The first perfect dumpling
One day when Haha is nearly at the end of her resources, she takes the decisive action of locking her door to keep the visitors at bay. She has tended to a personal need at last; she has established a boundary.
Then, hungry and alone in her kitchen-studio, cooking the last of her rice—the last of her energy, her last art supplies—Haha makes the best dumpling of her entire career. The film calls this dumpling “sublime” and “perfect” and sure enough, this is no normal dumpling. First it manages to make sad Haha smile again. Then, of its own volition, the dumpling slides off Haha’s plate and leads her out of her home and into the underworld. In psychological terms, it leads into the depths of Haha’s soul.
A perfect dumpling with a mind of its own? There’s no such thing as a perfect dumpling, any more than there’s such a thing as a perfect person. And this dumpling is alive! Haha’s sublime dumpling draws attention to itself as a metaphor, representing at least three things: the sacredness and vitality of Haha’s creativity, the existence of her innermost soul, and her psychological tendency toward perfectionism. Haha must sense how important this dumpling is, because she follows it without hesitation. Out the door she goes and down into the underworld. Her creativity and soul are running away, and she must chase the dumpling to save them.
Entering the underworld
So down Haha plunges into the gray, colorness underworld, which is, almost by definition, no fun. I cannot stress this enough: the underworld is no fun. When you enter the underworld, you can count on things getting worse before they get better, and there’s no guarantee that will happen at all.
The image of the underworld is shorthand for the innermost reaches of the psyche where we store everything we can’t deal with right now: fear, anxiety, power, desire, and guilt. We push them so far away from our conscious awareness that we don’t even know about them anymore. An underworld journey is a harrowing way to visit these cast-off parts of the soul, to learn about them, hopefully without judgment, and to choose which to bring to the surface and which to transform into something else. Often it takes misery to force a confrontation with these issues. Suffering is a powerful motivator for change.
But remember the underworld stores more than psychological hang-ups. It also holds, like a bank account, the soul’s gifts and powers that we deny or repress in an attempt to gain approval and acceptance.
Underworld wisdom
What does Haha find on her underworld journey? First, she meets with three Buddhist sages, her inner wisdom-keepers, each of whom tells her a joke. Her innate wisdom is trying to communicate with her. Her impulse toward enlightenment—which is nothing if not a way of light-ening up—is trying to get her to laugh again, but she can’t. Not yet. She’s still too hungry, tired, and sad that her perfect dumpling—her soul, her creativity—is lost.
The first two sages also give her warnings: everyone is hungry in the underworld, and not everyone is a comedian, meaning that not everyone is enlightened. But Haha ignores the warnings of her own intuition.
Sure enough, at the third sage, Haha meets a man.
“Don’t hurt her!” the sage shouts to the man.
“Where’s my dumpling?” Haha demands.
Things get worse before they get better
This man, it turns out, ate Haha’s dumpling!
She ought to be angry with him, or at least tell him how she feels. Instead, she succumbs to his flattery about her cooking abilities and allows him to seduce her into cooking for him. Despite the third sage urgently shaking his head no, Haha sails with the man across a body of water and starts cooking for him. But the man turns out to be the king of the demons. He demands that she cook dumplings for his demon-followers around the clock.
The Demon King harnesses Haha’s energies for himself and his ghouls. Now she is caught on an even more draining hamster wheel, trying to keep up with the insatiable hungers of her personal demons in the underworld. Her conditioned pattern for pleasing others at the expense of herself takes on a manic quality, until at last the day comes when Haha makes another perfect dumpling. This second perfect dumpling, like the first, makes a break for it.
Haha knows she must escape the demon lair to catch this dumpling, so she drugs the demons and runs. In other words, she uses her cunning to outwit the complexes that hold her soul hostage. But the demons wake up and chase her. Psychological patterns do not give up easily.
Returning to life
As Haha sails back across the water, the Demon King drinks it all, stranding her little boat in the muck as the demon mob approaches. Haha jumps out of her boat, backs away from them, then slips and falls flat on her back in the mud with all the flopping fish. She has hit bottom: the lowest, muddiest part of the underworld itself. She has nothing left: no dumpling, no boat, no hope. And that’s when the magic happens: Haha bursts out laughing at herself. Silliness replaces seriousness, levity replaces heaviness. She lightens up, in a moment of muddy grace.
And laughter, it turns out, is contagious. The Demon King can’t help laughing too, which forces him to regurgitate the water he drank, enabling Haha to zip away in her boat back up through an underworld now rich with color. Haha arrives home still laughing, and the story ends with another knock at her door.
Who is on the other side? Maybe the Demon King followed her up. Maybe it’s the visitors who ate her out of house and home. But maybe it’s someone else completely. Maybe someone or something new has arrived, and Haha will be able to relate with this new aspect of her psyche in a conscious, creative, mutually beneficial way.
What Haha learns in the underworld
Haha has been to a metaphorical underworld and back. The beings who populate her underworld are metaphors for the energies of her soul. The thing is, these soul energies are not static. They can change, and we can influence those changes. That’s the name of the game: reclaiming energy from demons such as fear, guilt, anger, perfectionism, and people-pleasing, and assigning that energy to more useful activities, like self-care, creativity, and delight.
Haha’s two perfect dumplings are gifts of the soul that help her recover her soul. One of them leads her into the underworld, where she confronts her own personal demons, and the other leads her out again, with new wisdom and powers. It’s interesting that the second dumpling disappears from the story. Perhaps this indicates that Haha has released her perfectionism and reclaimed her creativity back into herself, away from the external world’s demands. Her burnout is on the mend. She can laugh again and care for herself, which will give her a strong foundation for sharing her gifts with others in a sustainable, reciprocal way.
Ted Lasso and Greek Myth: Your Field Guide to the Deities
In Gabrielle Basha’s MythBlast about Ted Lasso, Gaby wonders why she cries over a show about soccer. It’s an excellent question. I cry too. One reason, I think, has to do with how the series pulls the throne out from under the patriarchy, instead elevating a pantheon of mythic figures from mythology. And not just any pantheon. Ted Lasso’s emotional impact comes from combining the present-day world of English football with ancient patterns from Greek myth.
The Lay of the Mythic Land
Ted Lasso’s script plants clue after clue suggesting we interpret the show a) mythologically, and b) through Greek goggles. For example, one of the players says, seemingly out of nowhere, “Hey, do you like mythology?” In another episode Ted says, “Like the man says, you gotta follow your bliss” – the man clearly being the mythologist Joseph Campbell. And Greece keeps popping up in the dialogue:
~ “You can’t get a table at something called A Taste of Athens?”
~ “Where are we going?” “How about Greece?”
~ “Am I really about to eat something called Greek yogurt?” (ie Greek culture)
~ “And you leaving would be a betrayal on a level usually reserved for Greek mythology?”
Funny how these apparently throw-away lines are framed as questions. It’s as if the writers are saying, “Well? Do you see what we’re doing here?” Yes, writers, we do!
So ok. Ted Lasso and Greek myth, got it. But what divinities are we talking about? Well, the show’s Greek gods and goddesses build on core archetypes like Sovereign, Lover, Warrior, and Magician. In Greek terms, our Sovereign is Hera, queen of the gods. The Lover is Aphrodite, goddess of love. The Warrior is Ares, god of war. And the Magician is Hermes, the divine messenger and guide of souls — the cunning god of communication and change, tricks and transformation. But they all have different names in the Lasso universe.
When the show begins, Hera, who the show calls Rebecca, has taken the radical step of liberating herself from a miserable marriage to philandering Zeus, here named Rupert, who still can’t stop chasing nymphs. But Rebecca, like Hera, remains trapped in her own personal prison of jealousy and revenge.
Meanwhile the goddess of love, Aphrodite, or Keeley in the show, is stuck in compulsive, youth-obsessed sexuality and her failed attempts to achieve fame. The god of war Ares, or Roy, is facing a wasteland of middle age as he keeps on fighting merely to fight, seemingly out of nothing but habit and resignation.
Into this situation bursts Hermes, the trickster-messenger-magician god in the form of Ted himself, who believes wholeheartedly in the magic of everyone he meets even though no one believes in him — or in anything else.
Goddesses Will Be Goddesses
One of the main goddesses is Keeley-Aphrodite, the ebulliently sexual influencer who electrifies the locker room whenever she pops in for a quick epiphany.
Like many of her ancestor goddesses, Keeley’s totem is feline: she wears a lion costume (after a long conversation about lion powers), and the ceramic pink cheetah in her office named Trixibelle simultaneously guards and reveals Keeley’s true nature.
Joyfully raunchy at every opportunity, Keeley-Aphrodite consorts with the pretty boy Jamie Tartt (a beautiful young Adonis who must die to his own ego), until she gets past her own arrested development and finds her soul’s true partner in Roy-Ares. Eventually she even steps into her own Sovereign nature as the CEO of her own company.
But the primary goddess is Rebecca-Hera, the regal but embittered divorcée.
All Hail Queen Rebecca
In Greek myth, Hera is the queen of the gods. But these myths, written at least in part for the training and conditioning of women, portray Hera as a jealous, vengeful, humiliated wife, helpless to do anything about Zeus’s continual dallying with nymphs and mortals.
Similarly, Rebecca’s ex-husband Rupert is a filthy rich socialite who continually dates nymph-like mortals. Evidently immune to consequences, Rupert stands in not only for Zeus but for the whole idea of a single male god who rules over all. And Rebecca says Enough. In the divorce settlement, she receives the football/soccer club, and under her leadership, a new era begins. Just as Hera is the queen of the gods, Rebecca becomes queen of the team.
The first time Ted meets Rebecca, he brings her homemade cookies/biscuits (ambrosia) which he places on her desk (altar). This becomes his daily ritual. Rebecca accepts his offerings reluctantly at first, but soon she requires that divine sustenance delivered to her Olympian office shrine, which sits high above the earthy pitch. Occasionally she shouts down to the field from on high in her booming voice, and sometimes even descends to the locker room in stunning stilettos and a cloud of perfumed glory.
So while Rupert’s time is waning in the universe of the Richmond football club, the future belongs to Rebecca, whose supernatural wealth, beauty, and presence command attention in any room. At a press conference a journalist challenges her, and she cows him with her ruthless logic and a withering glance from her dizzying height. When she shows Nate and Keeley how to be assertive, they gape at her dazzlement in stunned silence. When Rebecca buys drinks for the whole pub and when she takes the karaoke stage, the mere mortals around her can’t help but whoop with joy in the orbit of her bounty.
In one of Ted’s lowest moments, when he has a panic attack in a shadowy alley, who appears at his side as if summoned? Rebecca. The Goddess. She knows when he needs her and she materializes. She holds him as he finds his way back. Her hands anchor him and her voice guides him.
A New Goddess Attitude
In the first minutes of the first episode of Ted Lasso, Rebecca kicks misogyny to the curb in the form of the previous coach. In another episode, Ted says, “If God had wanted games to end in a tie, She would not have invented numbers.” Another time we learn that Rebecca’s assistant Leslie Higgins is named after his mother. This makes him a “feminine junior,” to which Ted responds, “Cool.” Coach Beard reads The Da Vinci Code and coyly comments that he can’t put it down. God characters elevate goddess characters, wholeheartedly and at just the right moments. Goddesses adore all this. Ted Lasso and Greek myth make mortals who sense themselves to be made in the image of goddesses (so to speak) feel like they don’t have to fight just to exist.
Nor do Rebecca and Keeley play out the tired old madonna-whore complex we’ve been suffocating under for centuries. Rebecca and Keeley ace the Bechdel test with extra credit through the radical act of adoring each other. They hang out together, laugh together, help each other. They gracefully receive each other’s honesty, with no offense taken or intended.
The Changing of the Gods
One one level, the whole team are warriors for the goddess, but individual deities do emerge from the pack of players. Dani Rojas is Eros, the life force who bursts onto the field fueled by pure passion, leaping into the arms of other players, wrapping his legs around them and shouting, “Futbol is life!!!” Jamie Tartt is Adonis, as already mentioned, and Dionysus appears in every bottle of champagne, glass of wine, whiskey highball, and pint of ale.
But one of the most important gods in the show is Ares in the form of Roy — legendary player/warrior, besotted soulmate of Keeley-Aphrodite. At the beginning of the show, Roy’s passion is twisted up in a knot of anger, but he learns to channel that pent up power. Doing battle with his own unhelpful patterns, he first moves past jealousy, then he obeys Keeley (which drives her wild with desire), gives her the space she needs, and sees and honors her success on her own terms, apart from her relationship with him. Eventually he even embraces his arch-enemy Jamie-Adonis. Roy becomes a warrior of the heart.
But how does all this transformation happen? Because a Magician arrives in the form of Ted Lasso, who plays a modern day Hermes.
Guide of Soccer Souls
As this blog has discussed before, Hermes is the messenger of the gods, carrying divine communications between upper realms and lower, and he’s really fast in his magic winged sandals. The talkative god of travel and trickery, he serves as the guide of souls. He occupies the in-between, thresholds of all kinds, the neither-here-nor-there. He’s one of the gymnastikoi, or gods of the gymnasium.
Ted Lasso, likewise, flies from America to England, really fast and high over the ocean, to take a job as a coach for a sport he knows nothing about. A perpetual traveler, he makes himself at home in England without actually having a home there. He wears conspicuously bright sneakers as he sprints around the pitch ahead of the other players, and as he bounds up into the stands during a game to carry a message to Rebecca. He moves easily between the upper realm of Rebecca’s office, the surface world of the pitch, and the underworld of the locker room, where he even leads an exorcism of old ghosts, sending them back to the underworld where they belong. Funny, talkative, and weirdly charming, Hermes-Ted sees everything that happens, at and below the surface.
Most of all, Ted takes a trickster’s approach to coaching, which is to say, an indirect approach. His first step is to throw a surprise birthday party for the homesick Nigerian player Sam. Then Ted fixes the team’s showers, which had been dribbling like they needed a prostate exam (according to him), thereby restoring virility and strength to the locker room. He leaves gifts of books in the lockers personally chosen for each player. At a clutch moment, he benches his star player. His trickery keeps everyone guessing, always. You never know what he might do next, so you have to stay alert.
The Messenger is the Message
Ted’s full name is Theodore, from the Greek (of course) and it means divine gift. And he does give gifts. Parties, books, biscuits, belief — he distributes treasure of many kinds when the people around him need it most.
In a true Hermes move, Ted fools everyone into thinking he’s an idiot — vapid, ridiculous, empty — but what he’s really empty of is ego. And that’s the kind of emptiness that’s big enough to hold all the other characters in its embrace. That’s how he works his magic of guiding souls toward their best selves.
Ted also take nothing personally. He knows that people aren’t terrible, they just do terrible things. He sees their inner shine before they do. His job is to help them get out of their own way so they can beam at peak wattage. To do that, he stays on the sidelines working his indirect magic.
He focuses the team on winning at life, being their best selves on and off the field. He helps them find their strength, feel supported, support others, and step outside their petty, gnarled little egos. Gradually at first, and often falling right back into ego, they begin to do their joyful work. And it turns out that winning at life helps win at the game which helps win at life.
Ted Lasso also demonstrates how to honor the Goddess. In fact, Ted’s default is to treat pretty much everyone like they’re as sacred as the Goddess. Then they remember that they are sacred. And then they change. The show isn’t even about Ted as much as it is about how everyone else changes in response to him.
When Ted first arrives at the pitch, he crouches down and reverently touches the grass. The pitch is the temple of the sacred game, where devotees experience the divine. They feel wonder, amazement, awe, and all the emotions that accompany trying, failing, winning, losing. Ted Lasso and Greek myth together illustrate that play is sacred, and that the sacred can be playful. If the pitch stands in for the field of life, then the point is to enter the temple and play.
Messing Up Better
Ted’s job title is coach, which is interesting in light of the popularity of personal coaching. It’s like we hunger for our own soul guides. But still, why does Ted Lasso make us cry?
During halftime, when Ted tells the team, “Fellas, we’re broken — we need to change,” he is speaking for himself, for the players, for the team as a whole. He’s also speaking for many, many other men, and speaking to the world on behalf of men. Ted is nothing if not an agent of change, but more than subverting mere toxic masculinity, this show subverts toxic divinity.
Ted Lasso and Greek myth conjure a world of post-patriarchal archetypes, in which the characters work through their issues more than they act them out. It’s a femme-friendly, sex-positive, heart-awakened world, and I’m using the word “femme” to mean everything that patriarchy typically reviles. Things like feelings. Friendship. Fashion.
It’s difficult to convey how moving it is to step into a world where the Goddess reigns. In this atmosphere, those of us who have ever been shamed, rejected, or attacked for being or liking anything that the patriarchy condemns feel shock, relief, joy, gratitude. Goddess-starvation is a real condition, and Ted Lasso is nourishment for the famished.
In the world of Ted Lasso, everyone messes up, but apologies come easily and wholeheartedly, and are received easily and wholeheartedly. These characters are more interested in relationships than in their own wounds. And this world isn’t fantasy. It might be fiction, but its miracles do not depend on aliens or technology or wizard powers. This magic is actually available every day, to everyone. The only cost is our illusions and resentments.
Every character’s issues point precisely to their areas of potential. Their strengths just got twisted up and distracted by all the usual ego fears. Take those away, create a safe space, and people flower. They mess up, own up and then they have a better chance of messing up better next time.
Wonder Abounds
So the mythological 1-liner for Ted Lasso is as follows: Hera finally dumps Zeus and then calls Hermes in to help the fractured pantheon restore itself.
Through the muck and muddle of daily life, Ted Lasso and Greek myth lead us into experiences of awe — a towering goddess, a stunning win, the daring, defiant feeling of belief. Believe is Ted’s watchword, and it’s a very spiritual term. But he’s not talking about believing in nonsense or lies. He’s talking about believing in yourself, believing in others, believing that unlikely things (miracles) can and do happen.
The shock of Ted’s arrival wakes everyone out of a torpor in which they had been acting out very, very old dramas — dramas that lie at the root of cultures that derive from European traditions. If these characters can change, then so can we. If their patterns are not set in stone, then neither are ours. Ted Lasso uses Greek myth to dismantle our psychological and societal prisons.
What’s really wonderful is that we see the main characters lead with one archetype — Sovereign, Lover, Warrior, Magician — and then grow into another. They become more of themselves, more whole, more complete. Rebecca becomes Lover as well as Sovereign. Keeley becomes Sovereign (CEO) as well as Lover. Roy becomes Lover as well as Warrior. What might Ted become in addition to Magician? That’s the big question for Season 3.
“Life must be lived as play…”
“Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.”
–Plato, Laws