THE JOURNEY
As a woman proceeds on a heroine’s journey, she confronts tasks,
obstacles, and dangers. How she responds and what she does will
change her. Along the way, she will find what matters to her and
whether she has the courage to act on what she knows. Her character
and compassion will be tested. She will encounter the dark, shadowy
aspects of her personality, sometimes at the same time that her
strengths become more evident and her self-confidence grows, or
when fear overtakes her. Grief will probably be known to her, as
she experiences loss, limitations, or defeat. The heroine’s trip is a
journey of discovery and development, of integrating aspects of
herself into a whole, yet complex personality.
RECLAIMING THE POWER OF THE SNAKE
Every heroine must reclaim the power of the snake. To understand
the nature of the task, we need to go back to the goddesses, and to
women’s dreams.
Many statues of Hera show snakes entwined in her robes, while
Athena was portrayed with snakes wreathed around her shield.
Snakes had been symbols of the pre-Greek Great Goddess of old
Europe, and serve as symbolic reminders (or remnants) of the power
once held by the female deity. One famous early representation of
a deity (Crete 2000–1800 B.C.) was a female goddess with breasts
bared, arms outstretched, and a snake in each hand.
The snake often appears in women’s dreams as an unknown, an
awesome symbol that the dreamer warily approaches when she be-
gins to sense that she can assert her own power over her life. For
example, the dream of a thirty-year-old married woman, soon to be
separated and on her own: “I am on a trail, when I look ahead and
see that the path I am on will pass under a large tree. A huge, female
snake is coiled peacefully around the lowest branch. I know it is not
poisonous, and I’m not repulsed—in fact, it is beautiful, but I hesit-
ate.” Many dreams like this come to mind, where the dreamer is
awed or aware of the power of a snake rather than fearful of it as
dangerous: “There is a snake coiled up under my desk...,”
The Heroine in Everywoman