in a stable than in a home where they may be neglected or abused. When these girls find mother bear in themselves and find the support to be themselves in the archetype symbolized by the protective mother bear, they become competitors in the world. It is the archetype of Artemis that comes to the aid of these girls who, in some significant way, were abandoned and then found in nature or with animals the parents that they did not have at home. It may also be their nature as an Artemis to prefer to be in the woods, uninterested in staying at home or in doing womanly or girlish things.
I have known many women in my psychiatric and analytic practice and in my life who, like Atalanta, were psychologically abandoned and then raised by “mother bear.” As girls, they came from families where parental figures neglected, rejected, or abused them emotionally or physically, or where parents, because of illness, death, or circumstance, could not be fully present. As a result, at a psychological and spiritual level, they had to raise themselves. They also instinctively kept up appearances, worked at making good grades or excelling at sports, and acted as if their home lives were normal. It is natural for their Artemis nature to follow examples we see in nature. Nature provides animals with protective coloration so they don't stand out. When animals are wounded or weakened, they know to hide their vulnerability to avoid becoming prey.
Gloria Steinem wrote of herself: “I remembered feeling sad about navigating life by myself, working after school, worrying about my mother, who was sometimes too removed from reality to know where she was, or who I was, and concealing these shameful family secrets from my friends . . . now as then, I turn away sympathy with jokes and a survivor's pride” (Revolution From Within, 1992). Artemis is the archetype that protects the young girl who instinctively hides her vulnerability during the years of middle school and high school.
Girls who are not under the protection of Artemis may reveal rather than hide vulnerability, which can mark them as potential victims to be preyed on, bullied, or made scapegoats. Recent media attention focused on two young girls, ages fifteen and seventeen, who hanged themselves. It's an old story: Girl has too much to drink at a party and passes out; boys take turns having sex with her; her name is passed around at school; then other boys want her to “put out” for them, too. She becomes known as a “slut” and is shunned by the “good” girls. A new variation on the theme makes it worse: While one of the young men is fucking her (what else can it be called?), there are “clicks” as another or others use their smartphones to take photos or videos that are posted online and circulated around the school. Eventually, and in despair, the two young girls killed themselves.
I mentioned hearing about these two teenage suicides at the Pacifica Writers Conference in Santa Barbara and learned from Donna DeNomme (Ophelia's Oracle, 2009) about an “Artemis girl” who did not accept being a victim and whose story had a very different ending. What she told me warmed my heart and was the best kind of encouragement, since, at the time, I was writing Artemis with the intention that it would help women to see themselves in this myth—younger women especially.
Donna described the situation in an email to me:
One less-than-popular girl was thrilled to be included by her girlfriend with an invitation to attend a party. At that party her delight turned to terror as she was raped. Her so-called girlfriend filmed the violation and uploaded the video to the Internet. When the victim arrived at school on Monday, she was taunted by classmates for what they may have thought was consensual sex. The traumatized girl, who had been given Ophelia's Oracle by her grandmother a few months before, said it was the story about the boldness of Artemis in the book that gave her the courage to press charges against the boy who raped her, the girl who filmed the rape, and the mother of one of the teens who bought beer for the kids and then left them alone in her house. She told her grandmother: “Artemis would want me to do this.”
When I wrote Goddesses in Everywoman, I provided exemplars of each of the goddess archetypes that were public figures. Gloria Steinem, as a founder of Ms. magazine and a beautiful spokesperson for feminism, was a natural choice for Artemis. Her concerns for girls and women, her competency and courage to stand for and stand up for equality and empowerment of women, are clearly those of the archetype. However, Gloria—like all women—is more than an embodiment of one archetype. While one archetype may be the strongest, all of the others are potential sources of meaning in every woman. And not every facet of the strongest archetype has to be lived out or felt in each woman. Gloria is like a mother bear in her protectiveness and in responding to appeals for help from women, but she is hardly noted for being a woman in the wilderness.
Julia Butterfly Hill, on the other hand, spent two years living in an ancient redwood tree exposed to the elements in order to prevent the logging of an old-growth forest in Northern California. She is a symbol of an environmental activist who embodies this aspect of the archetype.
While an activist becomes proactive in response to or in protest against something happening in the outer world, the goddess-of-the-moon aspect of the Atalanta archetype explains the capacity for reflection—to draw back from activity, to think about motivation and meaning, to see by moonlight or reflected light. In the wilderness, moonlight illuminates; there is beauty and mystery—a oneness I experienced as a Girl Scout in the wilderness that became the source of later understanding that I drew on in writing The Tao of Psychology (1999). Sleeping outdoors under the nighttime sky with the Milky Way overhead, paying close attention so that I might see a shooting star (probably a comet) to make a wish on—these experiences prepared the way for me to slip into an altered state of consciousness. They prepared me to recognize that I was part of everything out there. They brought me an inner certainty, even before I had words for or knew of the concept of oneness that underlies all visible manifestations. It was mystical insight, and so very Artemis.
To be able to take to the woods, to turn to animals or to books, to have a rich imagination, or to be nourished by solitude are solitary activities that feed self-sufficiency—a quality needed and strengthened in girls who have to raise themselves because of inadequate, absent, disabled, or abusive parents. Artemis can be alive in the inner lives of girls and women when there is no room for autonomy, education, or protest in the world they live in. In the inner world of the imagination, a girl can be heroic; she can have a place in her psyche that identifies with global expressions of feminism that are condemned or ridiculed. She has an archetypal connection with Artemis, even if she must remain obedient or subservient, and is forced to marry young. I suspect that this accounts for the women who demonstrated during the Arab Spring against dictatorship, surprising the world with the fact that they even existed.
The Will to Live and Help to Survive
In my years of medical training, as I observed newborn babies in the nursery, I realized that personality traits show up early. Some newborns are quiet and placid when they are picked up from the bassinette; others protest loudly when disturbed. Most seem to spend their time asleep, but others look around and stay awake more. There are fussy babies who cry a lot and others who rarely do. Levels of passivity and activity differ.
I was taught as a resident in psychiatry that babies are like a tabula raza (blank tablet) on which experience writes character and personality. This theory puts mothers at fault for everything, including sexual orientation and psychiatric illnesses. While pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's concept of the “good-enough mother” (Winnicott Studies, 1994) helped mitigate the impact of this theory and lessened the pressure on mothers, mothers were still held to be the responsible ones; fathers were neither praised nor blamed. The unique personality of the baby itself was hardly ever mentioned, much less emphasized. It took having two babies of my own to learn what mothers have known all along—that, far from being a blank slate upon which we write, babies come with predispositions and train their mothers. They push buttons in their mothers' psyches and draw out aspects and responses—for better or worse.
I also suspect that infant girls and toddlers
