psychologically “armored” as Athena, as independent of men’s
opinions as Artemis, or as self-sufficient and solitary as Hestia. Their
heroic tasks are to risk intimacy or to become vulnerable emotionally.
For them, the choice that requires courage is to trust someone else,
or need someone else, or be responsible for someone else. Speaking
up or taking risks in the world may be easy for such women. For
them, marriage and motherhood require courage.
The heroine-choicemaker must repeat Psyche’s first task of “sorting
the seeds” whenever she is at a crossroads, and must decide what
to do now. She must pause to sort out her priorities and motives,
and the potentialities in the situation. She needs to see what the
choices are, what the emotional cost could be, where the decisions
will lead her, what intuitively matters most to her. On the basis of
who she is and what she knows, she must make a decision about
which path to take.
Here I touch once more on a theme I developed in my first book,
The Tao of Psychology: the necessity for choosing a “path with heart.”
I feel that one must deliberate and then act, must scan every life
choice with rational thinking but then base the decision on whether
one’s heart will be in it. No other person can tell you if your heart
is involved, and logic cannot provide an answer.
Often when a woman faces those either/or choices that will greatly
affect her life, someone else is pressuring her to make up her mind:
“Get married!” “Have a child!” “Sell the house!” “Change jobs!”
“Quit!” “Move!” “Say yes!” “Say no!” Very often a woman has to
make up her mind and her heart in a pressure cooker created by
someone else’s impatience. To be a choicemaker, she needs to insist
on making decisions in her own time, knowing that it is her life and
she who will live with the consequences.
In order for clarity to develop, she also needs to resist inner pres-
sure to decide precipitously. Initially, Artemis or Aphrodite, Hera
or Demeter, may dominate with their characteristic intensity or in-
stinctive response. They may try to crowd out Hestia’s feelings,
Persephone’s introspection, or Athena’s cool thinking. But these
latter goddesses, when attended to, provide a fuller picture and allow
a woman to make decisions that take all aspects of herself into con-
sideration.
Goddesses in Everywoman