ther Zeus. She was unaware of her mother Metis, whom Zeus had
swallowed. Metaphorically, Athena women are “motherless” in
many ways; they need to discover the mother and value her, to allow
themselves to be mothered.
An Athena woman often has depreciated her own mother. She
needs to discover her mother’s strengths, often before she can value
any similarities to her mother in herself. She often lacks connection
to a maternal archetype (personified by the goddess Demeter), a
connection she must feel in herself in order to experience maternity
and motherhood deeply and instinctually. Christine Downing, author
of The Goddess, calls this task “the re-membering of Athene,” which
she speaks of as “the rediscovery of her relation to the feminine, to
mother, to Metis.”^6
It is helpful for an Athena woman to learn that matriarchal femin-
ine values, which were held before Greek mythology took its present
form, were swallowed up by the patriarchal culture that prevails
today. Her intellectual curiosity can lead her from history or psycho-
logy toward feminist ideas. From this new perspective, she may
begin to think differently about her own mother and other women,
and then about herself. In this way, many Athena women have come
to be feminists. Once an Athena woman changes the way she thinks,
her relationship to people can change.
Goddesses in Everywoman