I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
In my work as a writer and artist, I’m tapping into the power of the goddess Metis, a pre-Olympian goddess of wisdom. She was pursued by Zeus and became his first wife, but he swallowed her when it was prophesied that she would bear a son who would overthrow him. She was pregnant with Athena at the time, who was birthed through Zeus’ forehead. Athena was associated with wisdom, strategic warfare, handicrafts, and the city of Athens.
In Goddesses in Older Women, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes that Metis’ distinctive wisdom is “centered in the experiential and tangible world:”
For a woman in whom the wisewoman is Metis, what she does with her mind or with her mind and her hands engages her soul. She brings the wisdom she has learned from life to her craft. Metis is a personification of applied ways of knowing and doing. It is an expertise that goes beyond technically mastering a skill or a practice. Metis connotes the ability to intellectually grasp the situation and act wisely and skillfully.
In Greek, the word metis came to mean “wise counsel” or “practical wisdom.” “In the studio,” Shinoda Bolen writes, “metis is more than the sum of the skills you have acquired and made your own; it becomes an alchemical process through which inspired work can come.”
When I write a story, or create a painting, I’m acting as Metis.
Women who live by the Athena archetype are father’s daughters, succeeding in a patriarchal world through education, ambition, and denying their feminine sides. Shinoda Bolen suggests that at midlife, many Athena-identifying women may become disillusioned with the world of their father, the world of the patriarchy, and then move to reclaim their feminine power, building relationships with women where before they focused on relationships with men in power:
When an Athena woman gains metis, she no longer is concerned about achieving power or winning for its own sake; these are the goals of an ego that accepts patriarchal values as her own. Metis the archetype of wise counsel is concerned with using time and energy, talent and resources more judiciously….
It becomes harder to stay identified with the Athena archetype as you grow older. As Athena women turn fifty or become menopausal, or lose their mentors or illusions, or outgrow an identification with Athena as an eternal father’s daughter, seeking approval from male institutions and individual powerful men, Metis as feminine wisdom is ready to emerge. You have to have evolved beyond being a favored daughter of the patriarchy to find Metis, who is the matrilineal half of your psychological lineage.
When she detaches from patriarchal values and adds Metis-awareness to her Athena energy, a woman may begin becoming more aware of sexist bias and unfairness. She may have been blind to misogyny before but at midlife it often becomes so obvious she can no longer deny it.
I was surprised when my memoir project Things Men Gave Me took a detour into gendered terrain. I always knew the project was not about the men, or about the romances, but about a journey I took, an evolution I needed. I didn’t really imagine it would ignite a new interest in and study of feminism. But this is exactly what Shinoda Bolen would predict might happen when an Athena-identifying woman acquired the wisdom and ethics of Metis.
I’ve started listening to podcast episodes from Philosophize This!, a podcast that starts at the beginning of philosophical history and walks through all the greats of philosophy. Yesterday, by accident, I launched an episode about Mary Wollstonecraft. I was trying to listen to one on hermeneutics, but accidentally hit the Wollstonecraft one instead. She was an English writer and philosopher living in the 18th century who advocated for women’s rights. She is one of the founders of feminist philosophers.
I think the universe wanted me to listen to it. I spend a lot of time immersed in philosophy from men, and not as much as women (naturally enough since there aren’t so many women philosophers). I saw the Wollstonecraft episode and thought to myself, “why would I be interested in that?” I was trying to refresh my understanding of continental philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, not trace the lineage of feminist philosophy.
Wollstonecraft’s life, however, provides so many interesting and inspiring elements to me. And, her experience of giving herself over to transcendent love multiple times aligns with stories I’m developing right now.
Wollstonecraft lived to only age 38. She died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. In her short life, Wollstonecraft achieved so much. After growing up poor, she determined she would embark on a career as a writer, seeking to support herself in a way few women did in that time, especially those without family money. She wrote to her sister that she was trying to become “the first of a new genus.”
Dispensing with traditional morals and ways of living as a woman, she entered a relationship with an artist Henry Fuseli who was already married. She even proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife. But this led to their breakup. Later, she fell in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay. She slept with him even though they were not married. She gave birth to Imlay’s daughter in 1794.
Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in 1795, after being rejected by Imlay. She survived, but then attempted it again in 1795, again over Imlay, jumping into the River Thames on a rainy night.
Surviving both attempts, but her relationship with Imlay over, she fell in with a London literary circle and met William Godwin, an English journalist, political philosopher, and novelist. She and Godwin fell in love, and then married after Wollstonecraft became pregnant. Friends discovered then that she had never been married to Imlay, and shunned her and Godwin.
They married in March of 1797, and Wollstonecraft died in September of that year, after suffering from postpartum infection.
Wollstonecraft was a prolific writer, writing first about education, especially for young women, then political philosophy, then women’s rights. She wrote two novels that criticized the patriarchal institution of marriage and its damaging effects on women. Her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was a travel narrative consisting of 25 letters covering a wide range of topics.
After her death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798. These memoirs included coverage of her illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. Few people read Wollstonecraft’s writing during the nineteenth century because of judgments about her life based on this book. It was only later, when the modern femininst movement started in the twentieth century, that her work began to be widely read and celebrated.
I find in her life both inspiration and also a feeling of deep pain, both at the way women’s lives were and are constricted, and also that she died so young. I’m thankful to podcaster Stephen West for his thorough, thoughtful discussion of her work and her life. Interestingly, West is a high school dropout and former warehouse worker who turned to podcasting to learn how to live.
Philosophize This! podcast highly recommended.