Finding a “Lower, Deeper Power” For Women in Recovery

Psalm 42, verse 1

As a doe longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God.

My soul thirsts for God, the God of my life, where shall I go to see the face of

God?

First Commandment

I am thy Lord thy God and thou shalt have no gods before me.

Introduction

In downtown Chicago there is a marvelous building

called The Board of Trade Building. It is here that grain

and wheat are traded as commodities. Atop the building is a

beautiful art deco statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of

agriculture. It is from her we get the name for cereal.

Notice and wheat and grain in her hands. The Greeks had the

same goddess image, but they called her Demeter. She’s my

patron saint. I prefer to use the Greek name Demeter

because somehow the name Demeter sounds to me like “da

mutter.” So here in Chicago we have da cubs, da bears, and

da mudder. At any rate, when the construction people placed

Demeter at the top of this building in the 1930s she could

be admired from afar but no one could see that she had no

face, that is until recently when taller office buildings

began to be constructed around the Board of Trade.

Contemporary employees, while looking out from their windows

exclaimed, “She has no face!” Indeed, she is senseless.

She has no ears, no nose, no eyes and no mouth. I wondered

if this statue might be a metaphor for modern women’s lack

of connection with a feminine Divine? I asked myself, “When

the importance of the goddess vanished and patriarchy took

over church and government, did women lose their voices?”

Have we women and men lost our own sense of the divine

feminine power and have we bought into a myopic, singular,

male power? Just a question I asked myself.

Recovery/Discovery

In a sense all of us are daily in a stage of recovery

because of some conflict in our lives. Because we are

human we have human foibles. We may drink too much, we may

experience bad relations, we lose jobs, we have bad health,

we have eating disorders, our foibles are often innumerable,

and most of us don’t even want to visit them.

In recovery programs of all stripes, people are

encouraged to find a Higher Power. (Personally, I am not

fond of the word “recovery.” I prefer the word “discovery,”

because anyone who has gone through the pain of coming back

from a bad experience has discovered something about

themselves. To recover makes me think of covering over

again. RE-COVER. Discoverers, on the other hand, uncover

things; we learn things about ourselves when we are in

discovery.)

Alcoholics Anonymous: An Example of the Absence of the

Feminine

Both my spouse Tom Lavin and I are Clinical

Psychologists. Tom is a Jungian Analyst as well and he was

called upon several years ago to give the keynote talk at a

conference on Alcoholism at the New York Open Center. I sat

in the audience of counselors and therapists, mostly women,

listening to the presentations from an all-male panel

describing the heroic journeys of recovering alcoholics.

The analogous heroic journeys were those of Christ, Buddha,

Moses, Icarus, King Arthur, and others. The journeys of

Moses, Christ, Odysseus, Icarus, Parsifal, and all the other

male mythological figures are marvelous examples of heroism,

but what of the heroic feminine journey? Christ and Moses

went up the mountain; Icarus flew high up in the sky. Going

up is a male image or motif. I thought to myself, “These

speakers are talking about journeys in life but they are

describing journeying through a male prism.” My question at

the time was, “Don’t women journey? Where are the stories

about women’s journeys? Though women psychically

accommodate to these male images and the lessons imparted,

they often are left unmoved and unable to relate to these

images as part of their unique heroic/recovery journeys.

A New Vision for the Next Millennium

After the alcohol conference in New York I returned

home feeling pulled to understand feminine spiritual

direction. I wondered, “Were there stories that depicted

feminine heroism and did the feminine journey in another

direction?” I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem,

“Stanzas From ‘The Grand Chartreuse,’” in which he wrote:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn (Arnold, 1961,

p. 187).

Arnold wrote these words around the same time that

Nietzsche was grappling with the idea that God was dead.

Both Arnold and Nietzsche longed for a new vision of the

Divine. The God, as they experienced him, was no longer

relevant.

As we enter this new millennium we need to be open and

nonjudgemental to new possibilities of envisioning the

Divine. For centuries women have adapted, accommodated, and

adjusted to directions handed down from a more patriarchal

society. Women should be free to accept this more male

image if they so like, but they should also be free to

develop images and directives of their own if they are not

comfortable with the generally prescribed direction.

Otherwise, we are caught in that awful curse called

Fundamentalism.

Please understand, I am not dismissing the imagery of

recovery programs. I am simply suggesting that women may

need other images to rely on. A “higher power” may not

necessarily be relevant to the feminine way of recovery.

Some women may find descending to align with a “lower,

deeper power” more relevant.

Jung and the Development of AA

Since the 1940s, through the implementation of the

12 steps, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped many

recovering persons remain sober and find peace by

encouraging them to connect with a “higher power.” The use

of the 12 steps has branched out and become useful in many

forms of recovery other than just alcohol. The difficulty,

as I see it, is that AA is a predominantly male-oriented

path to recovery. The tenets of AA are stereotypically

geared toward the way men recover. And that is, no doubt,

because AA was originally developed by Bill Wilson and Dr.

Bob Smith, both men. You can read all about the history of

Roland H,. Dr. Bob, and Bill W. in a book by Ernest Kurtz

entitled Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous. There

were no women in the embryonic stages of AA during the

1930s. Nor were there any women in the Oxford Movement in

England. So the language and ideas and approach to recovery

are, by nature, masculine. It could not be anything else.

To get an idea of where the concept of a “High Power”

came from let me quickly tell you a story. Roland H., a

wealthy businessman from Vermont, who survived the economic

depression, worked with Jung in analysis in Zurich. A year

after he returned to the United States, Roland relapsed. He

is reported to have visited Jung once again in Zurich to go

back into analysis. Jung was very forthright with Roland H.

and told him that he could do nothing for him. Jung

suggested that if he found a group with a spiritual basis,

he might find some way of avoiding the desire to drink.

Jung had no scientific theories about alcohol or recovery.

However, many of you may know that Carl G. Jung was

pivotal in the development of AA. He worked therapeutically

with Roland H. and later corresponded with Bill Wilson, the

founder of AA. It was Jung’s theory that when we lose our

Spirit (uppercase S), we may turn to spirits (lower case s).

Jung used the Latin phrase Spiritus Contra Spiritum to explain

what he thought about addiction. The English translation is:

The spirits against the Spirit. Spirits, with a lower case

“s” meaning a mind-altering substance; and Spirit with an

upper case “S” meaning inner force or inner Divine. When we

lose interest or inspiration in life we may turn to mind-

altering substances or ways of behaving to alleviate the

pain or loss, but the use of spirits can be

counterproductive. There are many addictions both

substantive and behavioral such as shopping, sex, eating,

and overworking. All of these, if used to excess or used

inappropriately, can initially ease pain or loss; they can

give a “high” at first, but in the end there is the let

down. As most of you know, people who have a drink when

they want a “pick me up,” are actually choosing the wrong

substance, because alcohol in reality, is a depressant.

In her book Witness to the fire: Creativity and the

veil of addiction Jungian analyst and writer Linda Leonard

took the word addiction apart. She wrote that the

etymology of the word addiction comes from the Latin addicere.

Dicere means “word.” We hear it in predict, dictate, dictionary. The

Romans called their slaves addictus meaning: “one who has no

voice; no vote.” An addict has indeed given over their

voting voice to a substance or a way of behavior. The

addict is a slave. He or she is not in charge; it is the

substance or way of being that has the power over the

person. This is perhaps the reason why AA encourages people

in recovery to find a “higher power” a real Pick Me Up.

No Second Hand Gods

You received a poignant article in your handouts. It

is from Grapevine magazine (February 1996). It was

anonymously written by a woman who experienced negativity

when she expressed a desire to go in a direction other than

the one prescribed by AA. She was searching for a “lower

power.” It shows how one woman experienced her own image

of power for her journey toward sobriety and that the image

was not necessarily consistent with the conventional “higher

power.” She met with harshness but weathered the

experience. It is a story about the one-sidedness of an

organization, perhaps even an example of the one-sidedness

of organized religion today. The article is an outcry

against fundamentalist thinking. Permission to publish this

article was obtained from Grapevine magazine.

“No Secondhand Gods”

I came to Alcoholics Anonymous beaten by gin and

depression, barely clinging to a thin and unhappy belief in

God and trying desperately to talk myself back into my

childhood faith. It wasn’t working.

I was an ex-nun whose faith had fallen apart in the

convent - partly because the order’s strict policy on

alcohol had prevented me, for the first sustained period in

my adult life, from drinking away troublesome doubts and

questions.

The first thing AA people told me about spirituality

stopped me cold: they told me if I wanted to live, I needed

an honest relationship with an honestly envisioned Higher

Power. Ill-fitting secondhand Gods need not apply. I found

this both liberating and terrifying. Terrifying because I’d

been taught to hang onto my religion like grim death whether

I felt honest doing it or not; liberating once I discovered

I was genuinely more afraid of drinking again than of going

to hell for unbelief.

The ensuing few years were an incredible revelation.

My sponsor has an interest in comparative religion, and some

of her books introduced me to a marvelous new faith, one

that made me exclaim, “So that’s what I’ve been all my

life!” I became a practitioner and eventually a clergywoman

of this faith, and it has given me the sort of relationship

with my Deeper (for me, a better term than Higher) Power I

could only have dreamed of.

Nevertheless, I have a solid granite derriere on the

subject of keeping religion per se out of Alcoholics

Anonymous. So I’ve never gone to meetings and tried to

preach my religion to anyone. I’ve seen the damage that can

do to groups and the confusion and pain it can cause

newcomers.

But I do try to be honest about my Deeper Power, and it

isn’t easy. You see, I envision that Power as female, and I

call her Goddess, not God. And in some AA meetings, you’d

think I’d thrown a stinkbomb into the circle every time I

refer to my Deeper Power in this way.

I was careful where I began saying it. For the most

part, my home group didn’t mind the new phrasing, so I tried

it out at another meeting where I’d heard various people’s

Powers referred to as God, Allah, the Tao, the Great Maybe,

and Eddie. All had gotten reasonable respect, even Eddie,

so I was totally unprepared for the roar of derisive

laughter that greeted me when I spoke one evening of “the

Goddess as I understand Her.”

I was thunderstruck, and tears came to my eyes. “I

nearly died trying to find a Power I could believe in,” I

told them. “I would never laugh at yours; please don’t

laugh at mine.”

I tried it again at other meetings. At about a third

of the meetings, I got either ridicule or after-meeting

conversation pitches. I wondered if it was just my area

that was unusually closed to the idea, until I began hearing

stories from other women of my faith on the Internet. All

confirmed my impression that female deity-language is the

one kind that routinely elicits laughter or hostility

(“You’ll go to hell for that New Age stuff, you know!”) at

AA meetings.

For awhile, I tried dancing around the issue with terms

like “the Creator” and “the Divine.” I didn’t wear my

religion’s symbol around my neck at meetings, even though

some Christians and Jews often wore theirs. Eventually, I

stopped dancing; that’s one tango not required of the more

“mainstream” believers in our ranks, and I truly don’t

understand why it should be required of anyone.

I’ve watched for years now as this problem has driven

desperately ill newcomers away from the program. They have

had to fight the prevailing society so hard for a faith that

fits, and it is so hard for them to face being laughed at or

scorned for it in what is supposed to be a place of safety

when they’re barely out of detox.

Please, next time you’re tempted to have a contemptuous

(and audible) reaction to somebody else’s deity, think: if

it’s what’s keeping her alive, do you really want to knock

it down?

Anonymous, Kentucky (Grapevine, February 1996, pp. 14-15)

BREAK

Let us move on to:

Understanding the Direction of the Feminine Through Story

Great art and great literature are often based on

ancient myths and stories. “Myths . . . portray a

collective image; they tell us about things that are true

for all people.” Stories can work at an individual level,

or they can be part of the collective understanding.

Stories help us to understand and they touch us subtly. By

hearing a story we can draw conclusions, we can see

parallels in our lives, and we can compare. By listening

to stories we thread together legends and mysteries that

help us to understand our past, our present, and our future.

Stories help us to cope and to relate to a particular

mystery in our lives. It’s the stories told and heard at AA

meetings and other recovery meetings that make the programs

work. When a patient I am working with says he or she does

not like to go to meetings, I insist they continue going -

not to talk, just to listen to the stories - to be reminded

of what others before them have gone through. It’s the

stories that heal.

The Greeks and Romans were masters at creating

stories. They had no grasp or understanding of science so

they supplemented explanations for natural or relational

phenomenon with stories using Gods and Goddesses as the main

characters. If someone asked, “What is that noise in the

sky during a rainstorm?” they’d probably respond, “Oh,

that’s just Zeus throwing his thunderbolts in anger.” There

were no scientific explanations; just stories. They used

stories and myths to explain the complications and natural

phenomenon of everyday living such as weather, loving,

hating, warring. You name it, the Greeks and Romans had a

story for it. If you pay attention to the unfolding story

of Jessica Lynch’s experience, you can see why this touches

the archetypal core of the American public. Even her

homecoming was touching, and it was orchestrated to be that

way. She carries the archetype of the wounded hero in

feminine form. Notice she is always shown in uniform, never

in her drab hospital gear. Today we might call what we read

in the newspapers, and hear on the news SPIN, well things

haven’t changed much since the Romans and Greeks. The

Greeks and Romans did pretty much the same thing. They told

stories to explain a phenomenon. They too were spinners.

My Search for Feminine Heroic Stories

In my search for heroic feminine stories of

journeying, I found many myths that depicted the feminine

direction of the search for meaning to be that of going to a

deeper power found in the underworld experience. I found

that no stories depicted women traveling upward - except in

the patriarchal Roman Catholic story about the Blessed

Mother. Mary is said to be the mother of Jesus, and at her

death she is depicted as being assumed up into heaven. She

did not go there searching for pain relief. She was simply

taken up. She did not go up on her own power; she was

assumed into heaven by divine power.

What I want you to notice in the stories we will hear

today is that all of the women who go to the underworld are

accompanied by someone or something else. They do not go to

the underworld alone. They are in a relationship! This is

very important to what I am trying to say today, because

Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Stone Center in

Philadelphia did much research on young women and how they

express themselves. The researchers found that young girls

are always in relationships. A young woman’s self-esteem,

her idea of herself, depends upon her relationships and how

she relates. The stories I am going to tell today, validate

Carol Gilligan’s research. Women are relational! Women are

sustained by their relationships with others. For those of

you who are interested, you can find Gilligan’s marvelous

research explained in her popular book In a Different Voice.

In the handout/explanation for this program, I had

mentioned that I would talk about four myths, but we don’t

have that much time today, so I have dropped the myth of

Eurydices because in reality it is the story of Orpheus who

goes to the underworld in search of his beloved Eurydices.

As you know, there are also several wonderful stories

of men going to the underworld. We find the male theme of

descent into the underworld (and the return) occurring in

the epic of Gilgamesh, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in Dante’s

Divine Comedy, however, going to the underworld is not the

commonly accepted direction of the hero’s journey. Men are

usually depicted as going up. Climbing a mountain is one of

the usual archetypal motifs. The Christian Passion includes

Christ climbing Calvary, and the laws were given to Moses

after he had climbed Mount Sinai. The top of the mountain

is a place of revelation, a place where one is closer to

the gods and can see more. My goal today is to try to

incorporate three ancient stories from mythology that depict

the feminine journey of going to the underworld with the

hope that these stories of feminine journeys will give us an

archetypal basis for a more feminine heroic connection with

the Divine at a deeper level. It would be interesting to

speak with Jessica Lynch today and have her tell her stories

of depression; about how important her relationships are to

her to carry her through her underground experiences.

Our first story is the ancient myth of Inanna found

etched on a slab excavated in the 1920’s in ruins near

Turkey and Sumeria, the area we refer to as Mesopotamia or

more recently Iraq. It is located near the Tigris and

Euphrates Rivers. It is from this same location that the

wonderful Gilgamesh epic was uncovered - also a wonderful

story of going to the underworld, but the Gilgamesh epic is

a male’s journey.

The next two myths we will discuss are probably more

familiar to you. They the stories of Persephone and Psyche.

It is from Psyche that we get our word for Psychology.

Psyche was Eros’ anima or soulmate. If you take the word

apart - psyche means soul and ology means “study of.”

Therefore Psychology is “the study of soul.”

Although the Greeks and the Romans had similar stories,

I have chosen the Greek version of these myths. The

archetype is the same whether told as a Greek myth or told

as a Roman myth.

The Underworld Journey

In ancient times, stories of journeys to the underworld

were common. The underworld was not necessarily a place for

the dead. It was not hell, as we know it in our culture

today. Rather it was a laboratory, a place of learning, a

cauldron for rebirth. Rather than fearing the darkness,

ancient people held a profound respect and appreciation for

its primal importance. They wisely understood that without

the dark watery uterus of a woman’s body, an embryo could

not develop. They understood that a seed could not

germinate in the soil; a compost pile could not recreate

itself into fertile soil. Staying for a long time in a

dark, damp environment provides a place for early growth.

The underworld supplied this place in the imaginations of

the ancients. Going to the underworld was an important part

of life. Today we try to avoid pain. We have pills and

spas all decked out for painkilling. Staying with the pain

often times educates a person about themselves and who they

really, really are. Pain is not easy but it is an

education. Think about the personal pain you have

experienced and what you learned from it and what you

learned about yourself?

Inanna

The descent into the underworld is a letting go of

upperworld concerns. Nowhere is this more clear than in one

of the world’s oldest surviving myths, the Sumerian story of

Queen Inanna’s descent to the underworld, a story that dates

from the third millennium Before the Common Era (BCE).

Inanna is an ancient myth about going into the underworld,

doing certain tasks, dying, and resurrecting - all with the

help and provocation of others. She does not go to the

underworld alone but in relationship with others. Before

going, she makes serious arrangements with her family and

friends.

The Inanna tale dates back to a time when the world was

more matrifocal. The root of the word matrifocal is mater

meaning mother. In ancient times, it was not unusual for

women to have been in places of authority and leadership.

The word anna in the ancient Sumer language, means

“mother of all.” The ancient name for the land where this

myth originated is Anatolia which means “land of the

mothers.” The land and time was very matrifocal, indeed.

Interestingly, it is the land between the Tigris and

Euphrates Rivers where we are fighting today. It is the

cradle of civilization.

In our story, there are several characters but the two

main players are Inanna, Queen Mother of the Upperworld, and

her sister Ereshkigal, Queen Mother of the Underworld. So

we have upper and lower world queens.

We are told, Inanna decided to journey to meet and

console her dark sister Ereshkigal because Ereshkigal was

pregnant though she had recently been widowed. Her’s was a

life and death existence. Though Inanna had never traveled

to the underworld, she was aware that the underworld was the

sacred realm of her sister Ereshkigal. Inanna therefore

made conscious preparations. She told her female aide

Ninshubar to seek help if she did not return in three days.

Three is an interesting number. It appears in a lot of

fairytales and nursery rhymes. It’s a number of

incompleteness. It appears in the story of Christ’s burial

and resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. Four is the

number of completeness and wholeness as in the four

directions and the four seasons. When Inanna

descended into the underworld, Ereshkigal grew furious that

her upperworld sister Inanna would dare enter her realm.

So, Ereshkigal made her pay and pay dearly to enter.

Inanna chose to descend to the underworld, but

she didn’t realize that her sister, Ereshkigal, the dread

Queen of the Underworld, would demand that she totally

divest herself of all her upperworld identity and dignity.

At each of the seven gates leading into the underworld,

Neti, the gatekeeper, refused to let Inanna pass until she

had stripped off each of her seven precious attributes and

relinquished them. First she lost her crown, then her

necklace of lapis, then her beads, her breastplate, her

bracelet, her scepter, and finally, her royal robe. Only

when naked and defenseless, unprotected by her royal

persona, is Inanna allowed to appear before the Queen of the

Dead. No uniforms here.

Naked and humbled Inanna was judged unfit to live.

Ereshkigal stared at her with the eyes of death. She then

left Inanna’s corpse to hang upon a peg until it became a

piece of rotting flesh. In reference to alcoholism or drug

addiction, I cannot help but think of Inanna as being hung

out to dry or just simply hung over. In Linda Leonard’s

wonderful book Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil

of Addiction, she makes just such an analogy. This must be

how women feel when they are in the throws of their

addiction - hanging like rotting meat. Something cannot rot

unless it has had life in the first place,

When Inanna did not return after three days, her female

aide Ninshubar sought help from the father gods but most of

the father gods were already angry that Inanna had even

dared venture to the underworld in the first place and

refused to help her, saying, “She went to the Dark City, let

her stay there.” Only kind Enki, god of the waters,

grieved her absence and responded. From the dirt underneath

his finger nails he fashioned two small asexual creatures

who slipped into the underworld unnoticed and grieved

sympathetically with Ereshkigal, who was by now in labor and

about to give birth. Ereshkigal was grateful for their

empathy, and in return gave them Inanna’s corpse which they

revived with the food and water of life that Enki had given

them.

Inanna was then told: “No one ascends from the

underworld unmarked.” When we have experienced a bad

situation, of any sort, it marks us for the rest of our

lives. Demons from the underworld clung to her side, and

she was required to send back a substitute to take her

place. Refusing to send her faithful feminine aide

Ninshubar, she chose instead her husband, Dumuzi, who had

been lounging on his throne in comfort. Dumuzi tried to

escape the demons, but they found and bound him, stripped

him naked, and took him to the underworld. Finally,

Dumuzi’s sister agreed to share his fate, and from then on,

each spent half the year in the underworld.

This reads like an afternoon soap opera, doesn’t it?

Actually, soaps are based on archetypal images.

In a sense, Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal are

opposites sides of the same person. Inanna is the queen of

the upperworld and Ereshkigal is queen of the underworld.

Inanna is representative of consciousness, and Ereshkigal is

representative of unconsciousness. They cannot operate

alone. They need each other to create wholeness. They need

to be in relationship.

Though Ereshkigal has lost her spouse through death,

she is pregnant. Pregnancy is a symbol of new life and

hope. Perhaps this signifies that Inanna who has died to

the conscious world above will also give birth to a new

Self. But first she must go through the birthing pains of

being stripped naked and hung on a hook to rot.

Persephone

Let’s leave the matrifocal world of ancient Sumeria and

enter the more patriarchal world of the Greeks and Romans

where women have less power and men are in charge.

In our story of Persephone, as in Inanna, you will

notice a similar motif of the need to return to the

underworld for part of the year. As we said earlier, going

into the underworld need not be a negative time. It can be

a time of rejuvenation; a time of quiet and catching one’s

breath; a retreat or re-treat. Right now our earth is

approaching autumn. Things will be dying, leaves will be

falling from the trees. The earth will be going into its

rest period getting prepared for the freezing cold and

eventual spring thaw. The earth’s cycle is very much like a

woman’s body. Women are circuitous. We have our menstrual

cycles. The moon has a twenty-eight day cycle just as our

bodies do. That is why the moon is a feminine symbol and

the sun is a masculine symbol. The moon waxes and wanes

every twenty eight days, while the sun is ever bright and

shining.

In the story of Persephone we are told that one day the

beautiful, fair-haired maiden Persephone was romping on the

plains picking flowers with her girlfriends when suddenly,

and with no warning, the earth began to tremble. A fissure

opened at the place where Persephone stood and a horse-drawn

chariot came up from the dark earth. Hades, the god of the

underworld leaned over, swooped Persephone into his arms,

and took her to the underworld as his new bride and queen.

In this story, Persephone had no time to prepare as Inanna

had. However, Persephone was not abandoned from above.

Her mother Demeter was in close relationship complaining

loudly and mournfully about the loss of her daughter as any

mother would.

When Persephone’s mother Demeter learned of the

abduction, she ragefully appeared before Zeus, the heavenly

brother of Hades, demanding the return of her daughter.

Stubborn Zeus had struck a bargain with his dark brother

Hades allowing him to take Persephone, and Zeus would not

relent on his agreement.

In Greek mythology the world is divided into three

realms each governed by a patriarchal figure. Zeus governed

the heavens; Poseidon governed the waters as you all well

know; and Hades governed the underworld. They were in

charge of their domains and they worked in tandem to make

the world operate to their satisfaction.

In sorrow and mourning, Demeter, the goddess of

agriculture, roamed the earth grieving the loss of her

daughter. In her sorrow, she knew of only one way to

persuade Zeus to give Persephone back. So Demeter played

her card. Demeter ordered the earth to cease producing.

This greatly bothered Zeus because as a result of the earth

remaining fallow, there were no sacrifices made to him nor

to the other gods. Finally, Zeus gave in and spoke with

his dark brother Hades, and they agreed to allow Persephone

to return to her mother on one condition. Persephone was to

eat nothing as she left the underworld.

Persephone was a young adolescent and, as we know, food

often plays a major role in the development of young people.

As she waited to reenter the realm of the upper world, we

are told she reached over and took the sweet juice from a

pomegranate for refreshment. As a result, Persephone’s

release now had a stipulation. She would be allowed to

return to earth as promised, but she would need to return to

the underworld one third of each year to visit her spouse

Hades. The Greeks used this story, or spin on a story, to

explain the seasons. When spring returns to earth, we are

told that Persephone is coming up from the underworld. I

used to tell first graders when the tulips and daffodils

were sticking up, that was Persephone’s nose poking through

the earth.

While in the underworld Persephone learned to be at

home and actually fell in love with Hades. She moved about

comfortably and settled into a sedate, slow pace of rest and

resuscitation. She was queen of the underworld, the bride

and companion of Hades. She had fallen in love with her

captor.

The phenomenon of falling in love with one’s captor is

not unusual even in today’s world. We saw what occurred

when Patty Hearst was abducted. She took her captor as her

lover. Then when released, and under police protection, she

later married her body guard. We remember in the 1950s how

employees abducted in a Stockholm bank were kept captive for

many days and when released, spoke highly of their captors.

In fact, the captive women were angry with the police for

their so called mistreatment of the captors. This is often

referred to in the study of psychology as the Stockholm

Syndrome. It is not unusual that women abused by their

partners often defend those very persons when the

authorities step in. The abused become partners in an

underworld experience. I was once told by Patrick Carnes, a

psychologist who works in a famous Arizona recovery program,

that ten of the fourteen female abductees married their

captors later. It’s one of the unusual things about women

when they are in an abusive situation. They find it

difficult to extricate themselves from their abuser for many

reasons - financial fears, more abuse, what will happen to

me and my children? They think, for them, t might be easier

to just stay in this abusive situation. On the other hand,

often when they leave an abusive relationship, they turn

around and marry someone just like the first abuser.

Psyche

Our next story is the story of Psyche another example

of a feminine journey to the underworld.

Notice as I tell the story of Psyche that she is in

constant relationship with someone. Particularly notice how

she navigates her journey to the underworld, not alone, but

with the help of others.

The tale of Eros and Psyche is probably one of the most

frequently emulated stories in the world. Movies, poetry,

operas, plays, literature, and daytime soap operas are based

on the archetypal image of lovers separated, rejoined, and

then returned to a state of bliss. Romeo and Juliet is a

beautiful rendition of the archetype of Eros and Psyche, as

is Westside Story, as is the Irish tale of Tristan and

Iseult. Eros is also known as Cupid, and we celebrate the

myth of Eros and Psyche on Valentine’s Day. Often times,

you will see paintings of Eros and Psyche in Art Museums,

and in the corner of the canvas will be a small angel with a

blindfold on his eyes. This is to show that Love Is Blind.

Eros is the god who makes us fall madly in love. The story

relates that Eros has a potent substance on the tip of his

arrows. When we fall madly in love, we have been struck by

his arrow, and the substance has entered our systems. Think

about when you have fallen in love. Don’t you do crazy

things? Aren’t you obsessed with the beloved? Love is a

drug. It does things to the chemistry in our brain. You’ve

been struck by the arrow of Eros.

The story of Psyche tells us that she is the last

daughter born to a poor family with two older sisters.

Sounds like Cinderella. As Psyche matures she becomes

absolutely beautiful, beautiful to the point that a whole

cult evolves around her. Human worshippers changed their

allegiance from the goddess of love Aphrodite, also known in

Roman mythology as Venus, to this mere mortal beauty,

Psyche. Aphrodite’s temples fell into neglect. Shy Psyche

is taunted by all this adulation. Though Psyche is

worshipped for her beauty, she is never chosen for a

marriage partner. We see this happen in high school where

the prettiest girl is not asked to the prom. She is so

pretty that the guys are afraid that she will reject them,

so no one asks her out

Psyche’s family is concerned about the marital future

of their daughter, and her father consults an oracle, a

fortune teller, who prophesizes that this youngest daughter

will some day marry a monster. Fearful, the father sends

Psyche to the top of a mountain where the gods will protect

her. Doesn’t that make sense that her father should send

her to a mountain top? Find a higher power, honey.

One day while the god Eros, son of Aphrodite, is

wandering about the mountain he spots Psyche, and because he

has accidentally wounded himself with one of his own potent

arrows, he falls deeply in love with her, and asks her to

marry him. This of course angers Aphrodite because not only

has Aphrodite lost her following to this mortal woman named

Psyche, but now Aphrodite’s own son has fallen in love with

this beautiful young woman. Aphrodite doesn’t know about

the marriage yet.

Psyche’s father agrees to allow his daughter to marry

the god Eros but Eros creates a prenuptial agreement, and

this is it: Psyche may lay with him during the night, but

in the morning she must leave their marriage bed, returning

only in the dark of the evening. She may not look upon his

face. Why, you ask? Because he is a god and any mortal who

looks upon the face of a god will die.

Psyche lives comfortably with this agreement and sees

nothing wrong. However, after a time, she grows lonely and

bored in her opulent lifestyle and invites her two sisters

to visit. They see what she has, and how she lives, and are

very jealous of the love she tells them she feels. They

tell her that Eros must be a monster because he will not

allow her to see his face. They encourage Psyche to steal

into the bedroom while Eros is asleep, and with a lighted

oil lamp, she is encouraged to pull the covers back and gaze

upon his face.

Early the next evening, Psyche enters Eros’s

bedchamber. In her hand is a lamp to help her get a better

glimpse of him. She leans over his sleeping body and in

doing so is wounded by one of his arrows. At the same time,

a drop of oil drips from the lamp and lands on the shoulder

of Eros. Surprised by this sudden intrusion, Eros leaps up

in all his god glory and runs home to his mother Aphrodite.

Aphrodite is furious with Eros for secretly marrying

Psyche, and she is still more angry with Psyche because of

her beauty. In retaliation for Psyche’s poor judgment and

disobedience to the marriage agreement, Aphrodite metes out

four severe and near impossible tasks which Psyche must

perform. If Psyche can be strong through these trials, she

may win back the favor of Aphrodite and the love of Eros.

If not, death will be her punishment.

The number four is a repeated motif in this story.

Psyche has four tasks, she has four helpers, she carries

four things into the underworld, and she meets four

individuals on her journey to the underworld.

As a symbolic number, four is closely associated with

the square and the cross. It is the number of the four

cardinal directions (north south east and west); the four

seasons (winter, spring, summer and autumn); the elements

(air, earth, fire, water); the four Evangelists (Matthew,

Mark, Luke and John); the four stages of life (childhood,

youth, maturity, old age). Generally, four is considered a

symbol of wholeness.

In the story of Psyche, if you listen closely, you will

hear reference to the four elements of earth, water, wind

and fire.

In the first of her four tasks, Psyche is required to

sift and organize a large pile of seeds by morning. She is

assisted by ants. Ants are bodies from the earth.

The second task requires her to gather fleece from

grazing rams. Reeds that grow along the banks of the river

talk to her and tell her how to get the fleece by waiting

until the rams have retired to their barn. She can then

gather the loosened wool from the brambles and the fence.

The third task requires Psyche to scoop up water from

the river Styx. An eagle flies to her aid and gathers the

water for her. The eagle depends on the wind for its

survival.

Lastly, Psyche is to get a box of beauty ointment from

Persephone in Hades. A tower talks her through the fiery

process. Psyche is on a journey toward wholeness, if she

can survive.

When Psyche has suffered enough and accomplished these

four tasks with the kind help of others, she leaves the

underworld to find Eros waiting for her. They reunite and

Zeus changes her from a mere mortal into a Divine goddess.

Eros and Psyche have a daughter they name Bliss and they

live happily ever after.

Summary

What strikes me about the three feminine mythological

journeys we have heard is the fact that all of the main

characters were in need of the kind support of others to

help them survive their ordeals. With reference to those

who participate in recovery programs, a person initially can

find it hard to fight the battle of their addiction alone.

That is why a new member of any recovery program is

encouraged to find a sponsor (from the Latin sponsa),

someone who can partner the recovering person in their

heroic journey through the underworld.

Why Differentiate Between Masculine and Feminine

Spirituality?

Is there a difference in the way men and women

develop spiritually? Is there a need to honor the feminine

way? As mentioned earlier, Carol Gilligan and her

researchers have shown us, through their research, that

women tend to approach relationships in a circuitous

fashion. Men tend to think and speak in a more linear

fashion. Both men and women get to the same destination but

with different modes of approach. If a relationship

approach with human beings can be different for women and

men, might then a relationship with a Divine be just as

different?

Several years ago, my spouse, Tom Lavin, and I were

giving a talk to a group of spiritual seekers in Ireland. I

began the talk with images of going in the direction of the

dark, chthonic underworld. Tom then talked about the hero’s

journey above. Our purpose was to balance and make

inclusive the archetypal image of journeying from both a

male and a female perspective. Our aim was to help the

audience understand the need to go in both directions - to

the upper world and to the underworld. After our

presentations, a gentleman in the audience, who obviously

was not listening to me, asked a question of my spouse. He

said, “I belong to a men’s study group and, recently, we

have found ourselves stuck in the dark. Could you shed some

light on our dilemma?” Those were his exact words! Tom

turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and said he would

defer the question to me. I simply responded, “What’s wrong

with the dark? If you stay there, you may learn some very

valuable lessons.” Men tend to want to get out of the dark,

they want to be “enlightened”; women, though they do not

necessarily like the dark, are able to navigate a dark

situation longer. Perhaps this has something to do with the

symbolism of the moon and sun that I spoke of earlier. The

moon waxes and wanes, but the sun is forever shining. The

male may need to always be in the light, while the moon is

satisfied with being in the dark sometimes. Jungian

analyst, Betty Meador (1992) explained this in her book

Uncursing the Darkness. She wrote:

Our own American culture, built on Judeo-Christian

monotheism, carries a strong bias against the dark, against

chaos, the dark side of order, against the cyclic which

includes waxing and waning, against the feminine as it is

related to the dark, and ultimately against the containing

of opposites in favor of the light only. (p. 118)

A Vision for the New Millennium

For decades, women have accommodated and adjusted to

the direction prescribed by recovery programs and everyone

else. The dominant admonition of recovery programs is to

find a “higher power.” This may be appropriate and helpful

to many people, but some women may be comfortable with their

underworld experience and need to be encouraged to sit with

it and be as comfortable in it as possible, remembering they

can bare the unbearable if they are in relationship with

someone else - a therapist, a friend, a lover, a parent, a

sponsor. As we enter this new millennium, we as health care

providers have the responsibility to be inclusive and open

to all venues when escorting those in recovery/discovery.

We need to be open to new possibilities and new directions

for envisioning the recovery process. It is extremely

important to honor individual ways of approaching a

spiritual path. There is no right way, nor wrong way, nor

only way.

Black Madonnas

Dark images of feminine divine have been with us for

centuries. We just don’t pay attention to them. I have

collected several images to show you here today. They are

just a small number. The Black Madonna is know throughout

the world in other countries. It is an archetype,

I am open to any questions after these images are

shown.

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