Chipo Jones, Wikimedia
The Greek goddess Athena was a warrior, the patron of cities and mentor of heroes, clear-eyed, practical, and strategic. What was her great power?
She was the goddess of Reason.
Yes, the ancient Greek patriarchy, a model of misogyny, imagined “reason” as female.
This being myth, there’s plenty to unpack and contradicts abound. This episode is your invitation to meet Athena and reflect on the conundrums she presents. She’s present today and she’s at work— in what form and to what end, I wonder?
Transcript of Athena, goddess of Reason?!
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and what myth can offer us today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
The last episode about the Amazons, Agojie, and women warriors got me thinking about the Greek goddess Athena.
Athena, named Minerva by the Romans, is the warrior daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Metis. The Titans were the first gods, overthrown by Zeus and the Olympians, so Athena has an impressive lineage. She was described as tall and majestic, with grey eyes. She was the defender of cities, and Athena was one of the virgin goddesses, although this didn’t mean that she never had sex or any children.
Athena’s virginity, like that of the goddess Aphrodite, indicated sovereignty and a life lived by her own rules. And like the virgin goddess Artemis, who was chaste, Athena personifies female autonomy and combativeness. A lack of personal attachments, which is one way to understand the celibacy imposed on the Agojie.
Athena embodied a number of qualities but her essence is something the Greeks called “nous.” Mind. Thought. Reason. The ability to reason. To put the head ahead of the heart– as the Greeks said and as we say today.
This concept of “nous” was the foundation of Hellenic culture: to think, to reason, to measure and be measured, to moderate, in moderation, in proportion. “Nous” was the guiding principle in art and architecture, philosophy, the civic and material life of the cities and Greek society. Their crowning idea, which they set in contrast and eventually opposition, to “mythos.” Poetic truth.
In the 8th or 7th century B.C.E., the poet Hesiod called Athena “the owl-eyed goddess,” equal to her father in strength and wisdom. Hundreds of years later, in the 1st century A.D., the Stoic philosopher Cornutus writes that Athena means pronoia, the divine logos (Reason) that determines and orders everything. He writes, “Athena is Zeus’ intelligence since she is the same as his providence [pronia], and that is why temples are dedicated to “Pronoia Athena.'”
Now, here “providence” refers to the ability to think, plan, see ahead, and “take care.” Take care as in “be cautious” and take care as in “make plans for.” So, the ancients saw Athena as the source/force of ingenuity and strategy, the philosophical arts, and literature.
She was a fierce warrior with strength and courage, and she moved through men engaged in battle, inspiring them with her spirit. Athena preferred however, to win battles through creative strategy and cunning, and taught these skills to heroes like Odysseus. The wooden horse that was the downfall of Troy was her idea, whispered into the ear of her favorite mortal man.
Athena appears in many myths, usually as the mentor of her chosen hero, and this tells us a lot about how she operates. There are two stories, important stories that define her, that get at her essence, and I’ll share those with you today.
But first, here’s my question. Here’s what intrigues me about Athena. How is it that the ancients Greeks have a goddess of Reason, of nous? If you look at the Olympic pantheon you find goddesses of wild creatures and childbirth, of love and sexuality and beauty, of the gorgeous and powerful queen and wife, of home, the fertile earth with her many cycles…. all of these aspects, in one or another, express the primary roles assigned to women don’t they? Mother or Lover?
And then there is the misogyny of the ancient Greeks. In her very interesting book, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, Ruth Padel explains that, “In the Greek male worldview, anything female, dead, or wild is easily perceived as ‘other.’” The female, the dead, and the wild were all distinguished by a lack of reason, and a passive reactivity that stood in contrast to the integrity of decisive, will-centered male action. Underlying this opposition were questions about the workings of the mind, and the relationships between body, emotion, and reason. In brief, the female couldn’t be trusted because she was easily overtaken by emotion.
Athena as the goddess of Reason has posed a problem for women over the centuries. From a feminist perspective, we wonder if Athena is simply a victim or a flunkie of the patriarchy. Reliable scholarship suggests that the goddess had a long career before her assimilation into the Olympian pantheon. So maybe the Athena we know is a distorted and truncated version.
Some Jungians associate Athena with the animus, the overly logical, thinking part of a woman that can get her into trouble because, well, women are supposed to be primarily feeling creatures.
Over the years– and often in the minds of women– Athena is equated with “the father’s daughter,” or seen as the women who is a colleague and good buddy of men, a female who is willing to distance herself and if necessary, actively disdain the concerns and practices of the “typical” woman. She’s calm and practical you know, steady and helpful. She’s detached.
I get it, but that doesn’t answer the question. The Greeks had their god Apollo, the god of clarity and precision; he’s another face of objectivity. Apollo was the patron of music and science, prophecy, the sun and light– a range of intellectual powers. Apollo was the son of Zeus. Why not endow him with a few more gifts? There’s an important differentiation here. What is it? I find it interesting that Athena Pronaia had a temple at Delphi which visitors encountered before reaching the Temple of Apollo and the Delphic oracle.
Athena, Athena. Why did your wise father Zeus, ruler of the Gods and of mortals, need such a daughter? I do not have theanswer although I have some thoughts. I invite you to entertain this with me and see what you come up with. Now on to Athena’s defining myths.
The link between reason and Athena is reflected in the myth of her parentage and birth.
Metis, whose name means wisdom, was Athena’s mother, and Metis was the daughter of the oldest Titan god: Oceanus, the father of all rivers and personification of the water/ocean that surrounds the world, and the Titaness Tethys, who was the source of the great fertility of the sea and all water.
Metis gave Zeus the drug that forced Cronus to vomit up his Olympian children. So, she was instrumental in Zeus’ overthrow of his father. She was the first “wife” of Zeus, which means the first female principle he successfully seduced, although some say she resisted his advances by changing into a succession of different forms, and was forced into their union.
Once she was pregnant, well Uranus and Gaia, Heaven and Earth, told Zeus that if Metis had a daughter, she’d next have a child- some sources specify a son- who would overthrow Zeus, and since Zeus had overthrown his father Cronus, he was especially sensitive to this threat. He tricked Metis and swallowed her when she was about to give birth.
Some say that Metis used her power to shapeshift, and turned herself into a fly. A fly would be easy to swallow and so convenient for the story. I always wonder when the supremely wise are tricked, and am reminded of the Sumerian myths of Inanna.
A wise fly told Inanna and her sister-in-law where they could find Inanna’s husband Dumuzi after he was carted away to the underworld. For this Inanna rewarded flies. She gave them the privilege of hanging around temples and taverns so they would be able to collect information and secrets and would always know what was going on.
The fly. Small enough to escape notice unless it wants attention, and then a fly can be a big annoyance. Funny how that works.
Well, Zeus’ trick didn’t stop the birth process. He got a terrible headache. It was so bad that he couldn’t ignore it and he asked Hephaestus (some say it was Prometheus) to split his head open with either a hammer or a double-edged ax.
Athena sprang forth from Zeus’s split head, dressed in full armor and helmet. She uttered a war cry and brandished her sharp javelin, frightening the gods until Zeus convinced her to lower her weapon.
Presumably, Zeus acquired the wisdom of Metis by ingesting her and then undeterred, Athena springs forth from his head. Her earliest recorded name is Athenaia, ether dweller, a reference to the link between reason, thought, the air element, and to her birth. Athena was born from the head, imagined as the seat of the soul, the highest portion of the body, the one closest to the ether or the cosmos, where thought is located.
So begins her career, as goddess of reason and the right-hand daughter of father Zeus, upholder of order. Athens and many other cities and towns named Athena their patron and protectress, as she was the source of what was essential for civilized life, especially the developing cities and experiments with democracy, and she was a formidable warrior.
Athena was logical and strategic. She was practical and inventive. Athena is often called the goddess of “craft” because she invented spinning, weaving, and embroidery and excelled at these. You may be familiar with the story of the contest between Athena and the mortal woman named Arachne, whom the goddess transformed into a spider.
We call these “crafts” today, craft being the province of women, but these were essential technologies in ancient times, not handicrafts as we think of them today. Where else did clothing and linens and everything fabric that we use come from? Athena also invented the chariot and bridle, thus enhancing the useful of the horse, which was a gift to the people from Poseidon, and olive oil, a dietary staple. Athena also built the Argo (think Jason and the Argonauts) which was the largest ship ever made up to that time.
So, Athena had a lot going on, and-but-also, she had a tricky relationship with women. She counsels the hero Perseus in his quest to kill Medusa and later wears the head of that Gorgon goddess on her breastplate. She loved Odysseus and his son Telemachus and is noticeably cool to the clever wife Penelope, with whom you’d think she’d feel an affinity.
And there’s the problem of the role she plays in the long, messy, murderous history of the house of Atreus, outlined in a trilogy of tragic plays by Aeschylus called The Oresteia. This is the second myth about Athena that I want to explore with you today.
Aeschylus was 45 years old in 480 BCE, when the Persians sacked Athens and destroyed the temples of the gods on the Acropolis. He fought in that war. The Greeks ultimately prevailed and the Athenians played an important role in the victory. They saw their victory as a victory of Athenian values, like morality, moderation, and freedom. (Sound familiar?).
This fueled the flowering of Athens and the vision of a lawful, peaceful, civic society, including the early experiments in democracy. But it didn’t last long. Hubris, in this case an excess of civic pride and arrogance, brought it down.
Aeschylus wrote The Oresteia as a warning to his fellow Athenians. It was performed in 458 BCE, he was 67, and pride in Athens and the accomplishments of the city were still running high.
Here’s a brief overview of the mythic context for the plays and a plot synopsis.
The story of the house of Atreus is the story of blood guilt going back generations. Fathers kill and eat their children, sons murder their father and then betray each other. Completely dysfunctional, as we’d say today. Agamemnon and Menelaus, the two Greek kings at the center of the Trojan War, were brothers and sons of King Atreus. Menelaus was married to Helen, who ended up in Troy with prince Paris, the event that started the war. Agamemnon called on the Greek kings to honor their oaths and join him in taking up arms against Troy, and he assumed leadership of the Greek army.
The first play, “Agamemnon,” takes place after Troy has fallen. Agamemnon seizes Cassandra, the daughter of king Priam, who is the king of Troy, and a priestess in the temple of Apollo, as war booty. By this act, he offends Apollo and he throws oil on the flames of rage borne against him by his wife, queen Clytemnestra. Now, Clytemnestra is angry because Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia before setting sail for Troy. I said this was a bloody family. The ships were stuck in the harbor, there was no wind, and the girl was sacrificed to Artemis.
When Agamemnon arrives home with his war booty, Clytemnestra has had enough. She kills him and takes charge with her lover by her side. Wrong is piled upon wrong and how shall the family- how shall we, the playwright asks– arrive at what is right?
In the second play, “The Libation Bearers,” the god Apollo commands Orestes, the only son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, to avenge the murder of his father by killing his mother. The poor guy is deeply conflicted. Which side is right? To which parent does he owe the deeper allegiance? What is the form of this allegiance?
In the end, Orestes obeys the god. He kills his mother but this brings him no relief however, as now the Erinyes, the Furies, torture him to the edge of madness for the blood crime of matricide, an unforgivable crime against nature. You do not kill your mom.
Athena appears in the third and final play, “The Eumenides.” Orestes journeys to Apollo’s shrine at Delphi and begs him for assistance. Apollo purifies him but can’t absolve his guilt and release him from the old code and judgment of the Furies. Apollo refers Orestes to Athens and Athena to resolution.
The goddess sets up a court with a jury of Orestes’ peers and oversees a trial. The jury is hung and Athena breaks the tie. She weighs in on the side of Orestes absolution for the murder of his mother. In her famous speech, Athena says:
“There is no mother bore me for her child,
I praise the man in all things (save for marriage),
whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.”
Whoa. Sounds like an accomplice to the misogynistic patriarchy. But let’s open this up a bit more.
First, who or what were the Furies? The Furies or Erinyes were daughters of the earth, “born” from drops of splattered blood when the Titan Cronus cut off his father Uranus’s testicles. They were depicted as a trio of female winged spirits, hair entwined with snakes. Their purpose or role was to avenge crimes, especially crimes against family. They also punished hubris. Offenders were tortured by guilt and driven mad.
Like the Fates, the Furies had a power all their own, an old and primal power. Even Zeus had to obey their laws. This was to preserve the stability of the social order. So, we see a collision between the old order and justice meted out by the Furies, and the new standard of Zeus, enacted by Athena, who ushers in the idea and forms of an impartial and collective justice to replace the blood loyalties of family and code of tribal revenge.
You see statues of “Justice” outside courthouses all around the world. Look, she is a goddess derived from the Greek Athena.
How does Athena manage this? She can’t disregard or overrule the Furies any more than Apollo or Zeus. She employs peithos, persuasive rhetoric. Athena persuades them.
Up to this point, the Furies have existed outside the social order, as enforcers from the outside. Athena offers them temples and a place within the divine and social order. She tells them they will be honored as they are, for what they are, that is, they won’t need to change or be assimilated. And she offers them a new name, a name of respect. “The Furies” will be called the “Eumenides,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones.”
I turn to James Hillman, as I often do when considering the archetypal nature of the Greek pantheon and their usefulness to us today. Hillman notes Athena’s rhetoric and the way that she brings the Eumenides into the fold. She makes room, he says, lets them take their place as “resident aliens” and thus preserves the necessity of their concerns.
He observes that statesmanship is the art of combining. “Athene’s handwork [measuring and weaving] is the paradigm used by Plato for the craft of politics” (Plato St. 283-870),he writes, and adds: “Inclusion of the excessive and abnormal by weaving it in is the art of political consciousness.”
Hillman aligns the Furies with necessity, with what must be despite our plans and logic. Necessity is what we cannot escape, time being one example. For Orestes, necessity was the fact that he was going to have to act. He was going to have to offend one or the other divine principles, Apollo or the Furies. He was stuck.
Hillman says that “Athene brings Zeus and Ananke [necessity] together, because in her very person reason and necessity are combined.” Reason and necessity are combined.
To illustrate this combination, Hillman points to Athena’s association with the owl, the horse, the snakes of the Gorgon Medusa, alongside her birth from her father’s head and her patronage of cities. He doesn’t comment on her femaleness and his agenda in his essay, is to explore necessity and how it appears in life, the tensions that it introduces.
Logic he says, is not a sufficient response or defense, meaning it’s not the answer to everything. And I agree. Even so, it’s curious to me that he doesn’t comment on one of the most obvious things about her. The Hillman references are from Mythic Figures in his collected works, if you’d like to investigate that further.
So, I return to my question and the seeming contradiction in a goddess of reason, and I wonder about that fly, mother Metis, whom Plato described as a “winged soul.” Was daughter Athena subservient to Zeus, or was she his ally? Did she choose to be Zeus’s advisor rather than his rival? Where is the goddess of reason today, and what is her vision of an inclusive and just social order now?
I have a poem about Athena that I think you’ll enjoy. First, I want to tell you about a fantastic workshop offered by my friend and colleague Bob Walter. Bob was Joseph Campbell’s editor and friend. He founded and guided the Joseph Campbell Foundation for over thirty years and is deeply steeped in the mythic.
Bob is offering his Mythological tool box, Revisioning Your Hero’s Journey, at Esalen Institute in California from May 21-26, 2023.
Bob frames this experience with an important question: “Do you dare to re-imagine yourself?” We often look at our lives and ask “why?” he observes, when the more important question is “who?” “Who am I? Who am I told to be? Who will I be tomorrow, ten years from now, or who will I be when I die? Who do I want to be? Who is it within me that aspires, dreams, creates, laughs, weeps, and loves? “
Working this mythic material with Bob at Esalen is a potent combination, one that I’ve had the pleasure of imbibing. I’ll post the link to details about the mythological toolbox on the mythic mojo website and encourage you to join Bob Walter for six days of inspired, creative, chaotic, joyful, and challenging play at the extraordinary Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
A big, big welcome to new subscribers: Jean, Ariella, Bob, and Dana. Welcome to Myth Matters! If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website. You’ll find a transcript of this episode–the links I’m mentioning– and information about my consulting and the ways that you can work with me, and you can get on the email list of you’d like to receive the announcements and links to new episodes in your inbox.
A big shoutout of thanks to the patrons and supporters of this podcast– thank you! Maybe it seems like putting together a podcast like this by yourself is easy– it’s not. The support of patrons is so important to me. If you’re finding value here, I hope you’ll join Myth Matters on patreon. The link is to all details is on the mythic mojo website.
Now, that poem. “Athena Ode” by Barbara Hamby. This appeared in The New Yorker in 2016; I’ll post the link on my website. It includes a recording of the poem read by the poet.
Well, my friend, feel free to email me with your questions and comments about this episode. Let me know what you think about Athena. goddess of reason. I always love to hear from you.
If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.
Links:
In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self by Ruth Padel
Bob Walter’s Mythological Toolbox at Esalen, Revisioning Your Hero’s Journey
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