Thank you to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for publishing my book, The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024. This book is a collection of essays inspired by the work of Joseph Campbell. I love to write about how myth enlivens and maybe even enchants everyday life, and that’s what I had a chance to do in this book.
Do NOT sign up for this newsletter unless you’re into myth, creativity, and especially creative inspiration. Every month I send out an email containing tidbits on those topics, such as book recommendations, articles, and other fun links, plus my upcoming courses, publications, and events.
I will never share your email address with any other person or organization. For more information about my privacy practices, visit this site’s privacy page.
To subscribe, fill out this form:
About Joanna
Joanna Gardner, PhD is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose focus areas include myth, creativity, wonder tales, and goddesses. Joanna serves as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also contributes to the popular MythBlast essay series.
This post has been rated DO NOT READ if you have not seen seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things. If that’s the case, Fire Angel Baby urges 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’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.
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.
Nancy looking for Barb.
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.
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.
Joyce, ready to fight a monster to save her son.
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.
Suzy at the ham radio.
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.
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.”
El exerting her goddess powers.
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.
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.
Papa, ie the patriarchy, scheming.
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.
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.
Goo monster staring down at Billy.
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.
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.
Will Byers back in the Upside Down.
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.
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.
Hopper trying to shine a light in the darkness.
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.
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.
Barb has the whole 80s look: the hair, ruffly collar, and of course the Trapper Keeper.
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.
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.
Suzy singing with Dustin over the ham radio.
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.
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, 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.”
Queen of the Night, Burney Relief, Iraq, 19th-18th century BCE, British Museum
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
The goddess Parvati, late 900s CE, at the British Museum
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?
Ariadne, Roman, 2nd century CE, British Museum
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, 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
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
Haha in her kitchen making dumplings
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
Haha’s descent to 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 (left) and his demon minions
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.
Laura Lewis-Barr
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.
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.
Rebecca (Hera the Sovereign)
Rupert (Zeus, dethroned)
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.
Keeley (Aphrodite the Lover)
Roy (Ares the Warrior)
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.
Ted Lasso (Hermes the Magician)
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.
Trixibelle and Roy (Ares)
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.
Hera, I mean Rebecca
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.
Keeley grins at Rebecca
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 in his comfort zone on the threshold of a bus
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.
The daily offering of ambrosia
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.
Practicing magic
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.
Ted’s backpack is pure Hermes – ready for adventure at a moment’s notice
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, 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.”
I can’t believe that we haven’t commemorated our covid-19 deaths — 87,649 as of this moment — eighty-seven thousand six hundred and forty-nine. Where is the country’s mourning? The daily moments of silence for those who died and those who suffer? Our collective resolve to do better and unite for the greater good?
Covid-19 has changed things for everyone. Those who fall sick suffer physical changes. Families and friends shift into situations of grief and loss. Those who die experience the final, ultimate, no-going-back change. The rest of us change our behavior to prevent more death and sickness. Change, change, change, change. But what does it all mean, if we don’t make meaning out of it?
One way to make it mean something is to choose a change to go with all the unchosen changes. It can be anything that means something to you. Something you wouldn’t have done otherwise. Like planting a seed. Planting a tree. Writing a poem. Taking a day off from social media, maybe once week. Some kind of offering for all the people we’ve lost.
Covid Memorial Day
Since this morning when I began writing this post, the national death count rose to 88,450. Another 801 coffins filled, another 801 families crying, another 801 lives snuffed out. For all these 88,450 reasons (and counting), my household is planning our own covid memorial service.
We think it will be on Friday, May 22. Probably around sunset. We’re not sure yet how it will go, but we will dress up somewhat from our standard quarantine wardrobes. There will be flowers. Candles. Some kind of sacred sound, probably from our singing bowl. Maybe we’ll share our chosen changes with each other. I think we’ll end with a special meal. Maybe then we’ll watch a movie.
It’s a tiny gesture, I know, but it’s something. And a little meaning-making can go a long way. I share all this in case you might find any part of it useful. Mourning is necessary to heal from loss, and when we honor the dead, life becomes more precious. Since we can’t mourn together in person right now, maybe we can help each other share the grief in spirit, each in our own way.
The other day I was thinking about what change I wanted to choose, and I asked my beloved husband Michael how his family observed the Sabbath when he was young. He said they didn’t do any writing that day.
“What, none?” I said. “Not even a list? Or a note to yourself?”
Not even a list, says Michael. Not even a note.
Wow. Could I give up lists for a day? Journaling? What about reading? Could I sacrifice (a word whose roots mean “to make sacred”) my lettered habits in honor of those who died?
Well, they had to give up all reading and writing forever. And for a change to mean something, it’s got to really mean something. So, ok. For all the lives that left us too soon, I will set aside the paper and pens for one day every week.
In 1982, Walter J. Ong published a book called Orality and Literacy, in which he describes differences between societies that don’t read and write, and societies that do. I find Ong’s profile of orality particularly fascinating because it so perfectly matches the persona of Donald Trump. If Ong’s analysis holds true, then Trump rose to power through the dynamics of orality. The politics of literacy and orality are Trump’s strength and his Achilles’ heel.
Orality, Literacy, and Donald Trump
Walter J. Ong, author of Orality and Literacy
For oral people, according to Walter Ong, words happen out loud and in memory. For literate people, words happen out loud, in memory, and on the page, as objects you can capture, store, and analyze.
Oral cultures place their attention on external events shared with the group: speaking, singing, shouting, conforming. The result is a feeling of immediate, embodied experience. It’s a communal present moment that holds you in the hypnotic embrace of surrounding sound waves. Spoken words unite groups, but emotions rather than facts can easily carry the day. Orality works very well for controlling people.
Literate cultures, on the other hand, tend to be more internally oriented. To read and write, you need quiet time alone to focus and think. But written words free mental energy from the work of memory, so you can let your mind wander and try new ideas. You can question, probe, imagine. And the habit of analyzing marks on the page trains your mind to analyze other things: behaviors, the surrounding world, the past versus the future.
Ong’s orality-literacy spectrum is only one way to look at complex phenomena. But compare Trump’s persona with Ong’s “psychodynamics of orality”:
Triumphalism
Highly engaged emotions
Bragging and name-calling
A monumental, outsized, public personality
Simple syntax and natural, spontaneous speech
Frequent use of catchy epithets
Volubility and repetition
Combativeness and polarization
Celebrating swagger and violence
Traditionalism, or looking back to a past that never existed
Closeness to the human lifeworld, or acting on every instinct
Seeing crises outside the group and the self, never inside
Ignorance of the causes of disease and disaster
Check, check, check, check. Trump is an extreme case study in orality. He relies on live rallies. He delivers oral torrents into a microphone. Hates reading and prefers television. Writes only the length of a tweet, enough to convey memorably outrageous one-liners but not enough to approach nuance or complexity.
But orality itself is not the problem. The problem is that Trump doesn’t just reject literacy, he wants to destroy it. How? By demonizing journalists and the news they write. Forbidding federal agencies from subscribing to the New York Times and The Washington Post. Appointing Betsy DeVos to administer the nation’s study of reading and writing.
Weaponzing orality in order to declare war on literacy allows Trump to protect and enable his crimes and white supremacy. It’s also an ingenious way to slice the country in two and pit us against each other. Mythologically speaking, it’s how he functions as a culture hero for his supporters–the magical One whose courage and strength promise to save the group and create them as a people.
However, in rejecting literacy, Trump also rejects its superpowers. He cuts himself off from the fuller potential of imagination and analysis. That’s why his one-sided orality is his strength but also his weakness.
Literacy, Orality, and the Rest of Us
Walter Ong says that literacy restructures consciousness. If he’s right, and I think he is, then the more you practice the arts of literacy, the more you restructure your consciousness. That’s why Trump supporters and opponents have become so incomprehensible to each other. We operate from increasingly different structures of consciousness.
But literacy and orality can declare peace. Literate people can learn to understand people whose culture is more oral. For example, if you aren’t practiced in the arts of analysis, which many people learn in college, you have no way of analyzing your own hatreds, fears, and latent guilt that find expression in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. You have no way of guessing that you might project your own guilt, fear, and self-hatred onto other people. On the other hand, if you read more than you watch tv, you don’t apprehend the overwhelming power of personal charisma, and how cultural orality can foster the vital nutrients of connection and belonging.
Literacy and orality can do more than just get along, though. They can join forces. Think of presidents like Barack Obama. John F. Kennedy. Abraham Lincoln. They united orality and literacy. They engaged our emotions and our analytical skills. Proclaiming their vision out loud with power and passion, they spoke words they had written to serve the nation. They, too, acted as culture heroes whose courage and strength helped create us as a people.
When leaders embrace the politics of literacy and orality, they win elections and unite the country. Imagine a president who shouts truth from the rooftops. Who enchants us with the power of their vision, in spoken and in written words. Who inspires us to join forces and pool our powers for change. And who gives us compelling reasons and easy ways to step away from Trump’s abyss and back into a national community.
If leaders shape the psyche of their followers, followers shape the psyche of leaders, too. We can bring literacy and orality together at the personal level, and connect with people who inhabit other structures of consciousness. Because ultimately it is our own courage and strength that create us as people, no matter who holds office.
“Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.”
The Haudenosaunee First Nations people, or Iroquois, tell a creation story that begins like this:
Sky Woman lived on Sky Island, far away on the other side of the clouds. Her husband, whose name was the Ancient, had dry, withering bones, and he grew jealous when Sky Woman became pregnant with their own child. In his anger, he uprooted the Tree of Light whose glowing flowers lit all of Sky Island, and he pushed Sky Woman through the ragged hole where the tree’s roots had grown.
Sky Woman fell through the heavens, all the way down to the primeval waters. Birds flew with her to help slow her descent, and then, in the sea, a mighty turtle caught her on his back. Muskrat brought her some dirt from the floor of the ocean, and Sky Woman danced and sang to turn that dirt into the whole world, also known as Turtle Island, where she gave birth to a daughter who would continue the process of creating the world.
Canandaigua Lake on a September morning
This story comes from a matriarchal people in a land where hypnotically green hills undulate along serpentine lakes. My mother lives in a fold of those hills, a valley where time runs strangely and a different sun shines through the clouds. Last time I visited, I asked a Haudenosaunee woman how her creation story feels different in its original language. She looked off into the distance and said, “It feels clear, and bright, and like every word is the perfect word.”
Which brings us to the news today, in which a federal judge named Brett Kavanaugh finds the foregone conclusion of his Supreme Court nomination suddenly in doubt, due to allegations against him of sexual assault. The judge is now the judged, and he doesn’t like this turn of events. He’s supposed to be the honorable one, handing down judgments from on high. But with no dais to hide behind, he acts like a drunken high school jock who can barely string slurred sentences together. He displayed his rage on live video, perjuring himself for all to see in an attempt to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against him — trying to silence her much the way she describes her attacker doing. He sounded muddled, and dim, and like every word was the wrong word.
When the Ancient attacks Sky Woman, he destroys his own source of light. Without the goddess, he remains alone in a darkness of his own making.
But the assault also liberates Sky Woman. She is, in a sense, born through the wound in the ground of Sky Island. The trauma frees her to do creative work, dancing and singing to make the earth. Perhaps Dr. Ford was similarly born through the wound of her assault. The experience seems to have shaped her world, and, like Sky Woman’s, her story sounded clear, and bright, and like every word was the perfect word.
The Haudenosaunee people live in a world made by a goddess. They created a thriving society where women owned and inherited property. Women appointed and removed the chiefs who conducted diplomacy. I imagine those women asked themselves questions: Would this man serve his own urges, or would he serve the greater good? By answering those questions, they created their world.
Sky Woman’s story happens every day. The Ancient continues to rant and rave, and Sky Woman keeps dancing Turtle Island. In smaller ways, we all make our worlds, for ourselves and others. Sometimes choices are complicated. Sometimes they are astonishingly simple.
“Today we get together to remind ourselves that we were given a responsibility to live in balance and harmony with one another and with all the living things of Mother Earth. We think of the people we met and the ones we haven’t met as yet. We remember that all of the people who live on every part of Mother Earth are all connected, related and bound together in the same circle of life. So we bring our minds together as one. As we pile high our greetings, express our love and give thanks to all of the people here and everywhere on Mother Earth.
In Greek mythology, the goddess of spring is Persephone. The Greeks imagined her as the green miracle of rebirth, the effervescence of all melting streams, the archetypal Maiden. Daughter of Demeter and Zeus, Persephone blushes the land with warmth after winter.
Hades, however, lord of the sunless underworld, wants her for himself. Hades slinks up to Olympus to locker-room-talk it over with his brother, King Zeus, who has the unholy gall and/or stupidity and/or brain damage and/or evil to suggest that Hades should abduct Persephone when Demeter is distracted, because Demeter — herself the goddess of harvest and the fruitful earth — probably won’t understand. So Hades bides his time in the shadow-realms until Demeter steps away. Then he bursts out with a wind of corruption, his chariot opening a gash in the ground and his beady eyes squinting in the sun. He grabs Persephone and drags her back down to, as they say, make her his bride. No proposal, no planning, no celebration. This “marriage” is nothing but rape.
The Rape of Proserpina, Ulpiano Checa [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsBack on the surface, Demeter hears her daughter scream in the distance. Demeter’s mighty heart seems to fall in on itself, and she races over the world in a desperate search. Think of that vast anguish: the Great Mother’s Great Daughter is missing. Terror and grief threaten to split her open, like the chasm Hades left in the earth, and no one but no one dares tell her what happened. After nine days of this, Demeter begs the sun for help. The sun admits he witnessed the crime. It was Hades — the villain! — and Zeus — no, that can’t be, not her father… can it be? — but then the sun mansplains to Demeter that she should calm down and relax because Hades is a good guy. Demeter’s rage goes critical. It mushrooms white-hot. It swells, it explodes, it blisters the land with her fury.
Nothing grows. Crops shrivel. Harvests fail. People starve, stop sacrificing to the gods. This threat to Zeus’s base finally gets his attention, and he implores Demeter to calm down already. Teeth set, she declines, demanding the return of Persephone, as in yesterday. Ok, ok, says Zeus, just stop whatever this is that you’re doing. Zeus barks at Hades to release Persephone. Hades says he will, but first he gives Persephone a ruby-red pomegranate seed. That tiny shock of sweetness and tart explodes on her tongue as Hades springs his trap: she now has to spend half of the year with him underground, when the earth will feel the bite of winter.
Older men deciding the sexual fate of young women. Male oblivion to a mother’s love, to the need of all women for respect and autonomy. Indifference to the pain of victims. These themes sound so familiar because they are. They play out every day, in movies, tv, the internet, the news. Hades hovers over every act of sexual predation, from lewd comments to copping a feel to rape. Sexuality expressed as an exertion of power represents an irruption of the forces of death, an ending of innocence, a stifling of potential, and someone’s personal induction into a psychological shadow-world between life and death.
The Abduction of Persephone by Hades, Jan Peter van Baurscheit the Elder (1669-1728), Musee Royal des Beaux-Arts
As a metaphor for sexual initiation, this myth stinks. Notice how the story demands perfection from Persephone while indulging others’ loathsome behavior. Zeus can plan his own daughter’s kidnapping and rape, and Hades can carry out those crimes on his niece, but if Persephone so much as eats a pomegranate seed–well, see? she took the payoff. Maybe she had too much to drink. What was she wearing that day? Those togas are just asking for it... And here is where young women make their mental notes, consciously or subconsciously: I better be perfect, or I’m going to hell. No! Enough! So what if she ate a pomegranate seed? She hadn’t eaten anything else for days, she was locked up and assaulted by her uncle, she was in pain and barely able to sleep, too tormented by trauma and the shame of her own helplessness and not knowing what new terrors approached. Persephone owes no explanation to anyone, not for the attack and not for the pomegranate.
I know of no mythic tradition other than Greco-Roman that feels the need to portray Spring being kidnapped, raped, and held hostage by Death. Greek myth is one of the deep rivers that feed the roots of western culture. Their stories became enshrined as our stories, as surely as the ideal of democracy became our ideal. They float below the surface, in what we commonly call the subconscious mind, that vast, intricate, continual simmer that handles all your body’s squishes and rhythms, and all the skills you’ve learned so well that you no longer need to think about them: walking, talking, doing the dishes, world views, and beliefs, including all the uglies: misogyny, racism, homophobia. But subconscious patterns can change. The conscious mind can reshape the subconscious.
Patriarchy, as Hades and Zeus exemplify, targets women and children and people of color and the LGBTQ+ community and members of vilified religions in order to keep us afraid and compliant, but in the process it wounds the patriarchs, too. Demeter’s rage hurts the sky god himself. But more directly, power causes brain damage. People in power lose their capacity to empathize, to imagine into the viewpoint of others. They lose the capacity for love. No wonder so many sexual harassers simply have no idea that their “advances” are actually aggression, or that their desire for sex is not shared by their victims. Nor do they register or care about their victims’ fear. They need radical re-training in basic compassion.
Persephone, British Musuem
Incidentally, creativity thrives in a climate of trust and support, when we feel safe enough to take risks, when we don’t have to use all our energy for survival, when we’re not coerced into roles for which we have no aptitude or desire. The myth mirrors that. When Demeter and Persephone are left alone to do their thing, the world flourishes. When they fall under attack, the earth withers.
In studying Persephone, some mythologists catch echoes of a time when perhaps she ruled the underworld alone, when she reigned over the dark, mysterious realm of the dead. But how could a single goddess oversee death and new growth? Isn’t that a contradiction? Not at all. The Queen of the Underworld governs the dark depths that support all life. She guides the entire cycle. Hades makes death seem a terror, a defeat, a violent seizing, but the deeper truth of Persephone is that life is a miracle, like the coming of spring, and death is always a peaceful return, no matter its outward circumstances. Persephone simply turns the wheel. She pushes up the green shoots after winter, and she blesses the dead when they cross her threshold.
