THE AMAZON PROBLEM*
(translated from the French by MURRAY STEIN)
The old art gallery in Munich holds in its collection a marvelous antique vase of black background, which depicts the famous battle scene between Achilles and Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons.1 Dressed in a short chito, the beautiful Amazon pleadingly lifts her gaze to the attacking hero, inexorably advancing, sword in hand. Her hands ward him off, pressing against his chest and forearm, while he, gazing fixedly over her head into the far unknown, completes his murderous work. Beside them the bloody slaughter rages on: a companion of the dying Queen winds her way into the final battle, while behind the two central figures a berserk fighter charges a new victim.
The Amazon theme fascinated the ancient Greeks. One aspect of its mystery is that, according to legends, the battle-eagerness of the hero transforms itself to love at the sight of his victim. But did she also love Achilles? Antiquity has nothing to say on this point. In the Renaissance, however, Torquato Tasso takes up the motif and affirms the love in his Jerusalem Delivered. Heinrich von Kleist adapted the theme once more in his Penthesilea. Here the Amazon princess literally tears to pieces her secretly beloved, Achilles, who also loves her in return; afterwards she gives herself to death.
Naturally, they never actually existed.2 Yet not only the Greeks but the European Middle Ages as well never tired of inventing tales about them.3 That the Amazon theme touches on an archetypal motif, in the Jungian sense, is pointed out by Alexander von Humboldt: “The poem of the Amazons,” he writes, “has a specific tone running through it: it belongs to that uniform and narrow circle of dreams and ideas around which the poetic and religious imagination of all races of man-kind, in every period, revolves.”4
From the time of Homer5 down to the latter days of Athenian culture, the legends of their devastating character traits blossomed throughout Asia Minor, Greece and North Africa. Even Aeschylus and the orators of the enlightened fourth century considered it a great deed, worthy to be compared with the heroic feats of the Persian Wars, that Theseus overcame these bold conquerors and thereby saved Athens from destruction.
As is well-known, these mysterious women placed value neither on marriage in general nor on men and sons in particular. According to the dominant tradition, they inhabited the Doiantic fields through which the Pontic river, Thermodon, runs before it empties into the Black Sea. There, in northern Anatolia, two queens stood at the head of their populous state. Men were either excluded entirely from this land or simply tolerated for procreative purposes. If allowed to remain, they were held in a position of social abasement and actual slavery, trusted only with the commonplace household tasks, such as the women would otherwise perform themselves (save child-bearing, of course). Forcibly crippling the arms or legs of boy-children, the women robbed the men of ability to bear arms and thereby rendered them harmless to the feminine ruling caste.
The legends, mainly transmitted by Strabo and Diodorus Siculus,6 say that the women mutilated themselves as well. In early childhood they burned away the right breast of all their daughters. This allowed them greater ease in using the right arm, particularly for spear-casting and archery. Only women bore military arms, and they not only defended their own country but also raided the lands of their neighbors across the borders. On such occasions they became the founders of famous cities and sacred shrines along the Pontos, in Aiolia and in Ionia. These expeditions also gave them the opportunity to meet certain Greek heroes. Wild, terrifying warriors, they fought partly on foot, partly on horseback. For weapons they used the spear, the bow, the double-ax, and the “Pelta,” a shield formed like a halfmoon. Their dress, made of wild-animal hides, often shows the style of the Scythian horsemen, resembling (roughly) a modern ski-suit; as head-covering they wore a hat on the Phrygian model (just like the one later worn by the French Marianne!). At home they preferred to busy themselves with breeding horses, hunting and war-games. They trained their daughters from childhood in these activities.
According to Strabo, the Amazons would get together with a group of men once a year, in spring, and living together for two months in the mountains would engage in frequent sexual intercourse in the dark of night so that the fathers would remain anonymous. These encounters were then followed by a common sacrifice to Ares and to their chief Goddess, Artemis of Tauros, who as divine huntress, pursuing wild boars and deer over Taygetos and Erymanthos, does not deny her own Amazon-like quality.
Ever since Friedrich Creuzer and after him Bachofen, scholars have presumed that this mythologem mirrors a matriarchal culture. In fact several lines of evidence do point to the Amazons as the favored daughters of the Anatolian Great Mother. This accounts for their role as founders of cities, since the city symbolizes the Great Mother motif. The Amazonian double-ax is also a symbol of the Great Mother, and according to Usener it stood over Cretan-Mycenian culture as the cross dominates Christendom. Moreover, the Pelta shield, in the shape of a half-moon, as well as the founding of temples, of which that of Artemis in Ephesus was the most famous, point to a Mother Goddess in the background. And not least important as evidence along this line of thought is the point that sexual intercourse occurred, so say the legends, without choice of male partner.
A close scrutiny of Greek mythology, especially of the later Hellenistic tradition, shows it swarming with Amazon figures. If not always referred to explicitly as Amazons, they can still be recognized as such by their detachment from men and by their enmity towards them. One thinks of the legends of the inhabitants of Lemnos. Led by their Queen, Hypsipyle, who was descended from the Amazon Myrine, they disposed of their husbands and the other men of the island by the expedient of murder and afterwards themselves assumed authority over the island. To this category belong also the fleet-footed virgin huntresses: first, Atalante, the puella pernix ("swift maiden"); then, the wild Thracian, Harpalyke, of whom Virgil sang and who was named after the predatory wolf; also the bellatrix ("woman warrior") Camilla, and the lion-taming Kyrene with whom Apollo fell in love; finally Britomartis, the “sure shooter” as Kallimachos named her, who was followed for nine months throughout Crete by King Minos and finally eluded him through the famous ocean spring. Their names are numerous, but all of them present the image of Artemis, the great divine huntress.7 These untouched, nymphlike, love-shy girls, who in most instances spell doom for a man, usually can be overcome only through the helpful mediation of a God or Goddess.
Amazons and Maenads
However, there is no mistaking a parallel between the Amazons and the wild Thracian Maenads of Bacchus. Except for Ares, who is their father, Dionysos is the only masculine deity who has a relationship (albeit a conflict-ridden one) with these women. This is not only because Dionysos is a God of women (so is Ares occasionally), nor because Dionysos (at least in his Thracian form) bears affinities to Ares8 and under the cognomen Enyalios ("the warlike") reveals battling traits (Macrob. Sat., I, 19). It is also because both Gods show an ecstatic tendency, Ares in his aggressive fury, Dionysos in the mania of a nature-intoxicated spirit. And finally, the similarity between the two groups of women rests upon Artemis, who herself betrays Bacchantic traits. She whom Homer9 calls “the cheerful archer” storms drunkenly about with her golden bow and deadly arrows, her whole appearance fiercely aglow. The peaks of lofty mountains tremble and gloomy forests crash with frightful sound when the hunt rages; the earth and sea shiver; all about her swarm the fleet-footed nymphs, the howling hounds, and the shrill cries of the chase. Like Artemis, Dionysos was a God of the hunt,10 and the Maenads were compared to hunting dogs and appear sometimes also as huntresses.”11
Amazons can be transformed into Maenads, as happened on Samos. A group of them, beaten and chased by Dionysos from Ephesus, fled to Samos and were converted there.12 Lyaios ("the loosener"), the great savior, freed them from the bonds of Ares in order to lock them in his own. His bonds, however, were only temporary, for it belonged to the nature of Dionysos that as soon as he appeared among the human race and stirred it into frenzy he would disappear.
Another association between Amazons and Maenads inheres in the figure of Dionysos’s wet-nurse, Hipta,13 an ancient Goddess of Asia Minor. According to modern research, she is identical with the warlike Anatolian Hepat, the chief Goddess of the Hurrite pantheon. She has the character of a potnia hippon, “a sovereign of the horses,” and according to folk-etymology the names of the Amazons that contain “hippo” are supposed to point back to her “horsey,” thus martial, character.”14
We shall later look at a further parallel between the Amazons and Dionysos: the androgyny of the God and of the Amazons, here a God in a fluttering double-girdled garment, there the women astride their horses, a picture of double hermaphroditism.15
Amazons and Ares
Regarding the origin of the Amazons, antiquity believed that they were the daughters of Ares, God of war, and the nymph Harmonia,16 who conceived them in the holy Wood of Akmon, near the river Thermodon. The descent of Harmonia is usually credited to Ares and Aphrodite. As such, she becomes a more youthful version of Aphrodite, who herself took the related name “Harma"17 in Delphi. So the Goddess of love is also the mother of the Amazons.
The name Harmonia signifies properly structured order and balanced relation of the parts to the whole. The old Greek word for the correctly joined together parts of a war chariot was harma, an expression that is etymologically related to the name Harmonia.18 Harmonia, daughter of the Goddess of love and the potent God of war, represents the fruit of the union of opposites. But the name Harmonia also, naturally, points to its latent counter-pole, disharmony, the contribution of her paternity—but not only of her paternity, since the antinomy love/war was originally contained within the Great Goddess herself, whether called Ishtar, Astarte, Anat, Aphrodite or whatever. In this connection Ishtar is best known as one who explicitly binds the poles together within her own nature. But Aphrodite, too, bears the marks of these warlike character traits, so much so that in Sparta there was an armed statue of Aphrodite Areia.
How should we characterize this raging, Ares, the God in whom the warlike aspect of the Great Goddess appears as split-off animus? Is he, as appears at first glance, merely the God of massacre, military turmoil, murderous warfare?
There are witnessing etymological associations.20 The name Ares is connected to the Greek word arsen = masculine, and to arsenoma = masculine seed. From the Indo-Germanic root eres one can trace branches that include meaningful relations among “to flow", “moisture,” “dew,” words meaning “lively movement,” also “to wander about aimlessly,” “enraged,” and “stirred up.” Also belonging to this etymological nexus are such items as the Old Norse ras = course, race; Anglo-Saxon roes = course, race, attack; Middle High German rasen = to rage. In addition, the Old Indic word for “bull” belongs to the branch meaning “to wet,” “to spill seed.” To the variations on the Indo-Germanic root eres belong the stems that include words for being angry, wishing evil, conducting oneself aggressively, being envious, and also the Vedic words for poet and seer in the sense of “frenzy.”
These etymological associations describe the psychological state of the libido in the Ares configuration: flowing and moving as the active, masculine impregnator on the one hand, and as a disruptive aggressor on the other. The positive side of Ares, the fructifying force, sinks into the background before the negative side. In the Homeric Hymn to Ares,21 however, he is called “the rampart of Olympus,” the father of Nike (Victory), the helper of Themis (Law), and “the leader of the most righteous men.” There he is invoked: “Grant me the blessed strength and courage to live without suffering, in peaceful orderliness, far from the cry of enemies and delivered from an overwhelming fate.” This very God, who is the classical instigator of lethal strife, grants the “blessed strength and courage” to avoid the strife of warfare. In psychological terms, the very affect that drives me into a berserk state of unconsciousness is supposed to form the “Olympian rampart,” which holds the quarreling Gods, i.e., the opposites, within the walls or temenos.
Athene
When the affect-laden, overpowering urge of aggression is resisted and integrated into consciousness, the dark God shows his fructifying side: destructive psychic energies transform, Dea concedente ("with the help of the Goddess"), into constructive energies. For this interiorizing process the heroic battler needs the Goddess, since the anima is the psychological factor that contains and reflects. This point is illustrated by Pallas Athene, “the daughter of the almighty father,” in a scene in the Iliad (I, 193ff.). The insulting words of Agamemnon, who has already stolen the lovely Briseis, enrage Achilles; he leaps to his feet, his hand slides to sword. Then for a split-second he reflects: should he strike his taunter to the ground, or should he use his power to conquer himself? At this moment he feels a tug from behind. He turns his head and meets the blazing eyes of the Goddess. She tells him that if he can retain his composure at this moment his antagonist will later be forced to give him three-fold satisfaction. At this, Achilles thrusts the sword back into its scabbard. He alone has seen the Goddess.”122
This incident points up the helpful quality of the hero’s anima: she helps him detach from the chaotic affect through reflection, which means “bending backwards”23 As the Amazons ‘belong’ to their father, Ares, so Athene, generally known as the pugnacious battle maiden of the Mycenaean Greeks, belongs to her father, Zeus. The Parthenos repeatedly declares herself obedient to the father. In the Eumenides, Aeschylus has her say: “A mother did not bear me, for my heart belongs to the masculine in all things. The marriage bond is not for me; I reserve myself totally for my father.”
"Athene is a woman, but as if she were a man", remarks Walter F. Otto.24 “Athene possesses the spirit of action. It belongs to her essence to associate herself with men, always thinking about them, always near them. She reveals herself to those who are separated from the erotic not through prudery but through the austerity and clarity of active effort.”25
It strikes me as noteworthy that this archetypal pattern associates mythologically with a feminine deity, and it reminds me of an observation Jung once made. In response to a remark that many so-called anima types (women) have a certain masculinity about them, he said:
It is the soul-image of the man. The unconscious-feminine of the man does not, after all, lack all semblance of masculinity. Therefore a man projects his anima upon a woman who has something a little masculine about her. She can then be a friend to him, and the relationship is not merely heterosexual; it is also a friendship, and that is essential.26
Stages in the Development of Amazons
Returning to our main theme, I wish to propose several hypothetical stages of development that lead to the appearance of the Amazon figures.
1. At a certain stage in the development of collective consciousness, an archetypal picture appears of a hermaphroditic divinity who bears feminine features but also exhibits signs of martial frenzy, a trait that later gets separated out as distinctive masculine. War and love appear united in her. At this stage of consciousness the antinomies are near one another—a primitive, labile condition with rapid and unexpected mood swings.
Evidently, the archetypal image of the feminine by which a man apprehends the being of woman27 possesses a martial aspect. For whether or not a tribe of woman soldiers actually existed is not the question; the archetypal image of these martial beings exists as a psychic reality and refers to the psychological experience of man with woman. It is woman as experienced by man over the course of millennia. At the same time however, this reality exists a priori, since "Goddess” refers to the archetype prior to all experience, possessing real but unmanifested Being. 28
"Militat omnis amans” (all lovers are warriors").29 Is it mere accident that the poems of the Troubadours and love-singers circle around the theme of the love-war? Is this a mere “poetic” metaphor, or a frightful reality? As Jung remarks,30 for woman love is not mere sentiment (such a concept of love applies only to man), but a will to live, which is frightfully unsentimental and even capable of calling forth the most chilling forms of self-sacrifice. On ne badine pas avec l’amour ("Do not trifle with love"); this holds true especially for ‘Lady Soul.’ In this connection one is reminded of the suicidal end of von Kleist, the genius-author of Penthesilea.
2. The second phase of development severs the martial spirit from the original Goddess. A separate masculine divinity comes into existence, in our case Ares, who embodies the martial spirit but also retains a double aspect as we have noted.
3. After this division into separate components, the love Goddess Aphrodite-Harmonia unites with the war God. The fruit of this hieros gamos, a conjunctio oppositorum, is a new hermaphrodite with feminine characteristics. This daughter is also warlike and shy of men.
I say “shy of men” and not “hostile to men” because the Amazons’ hostility is a reaction against the Greek heroes, particularly against Theseus and Herakles. Plutarch (Thes. 26) in particular emphasizes the friendly reception Theseus found among the Amazons: not only did they not flee from him, they brought him gifts. He, however, invited the profferer of the gifts on board ship, and no sooner had she set foot on deck than he weighed anchor and sailed away with her. Similarly Herakles: his ninth labor was to capture the girdle of the Amazon Queen for Princess Admete. The Queen was said to have received this girdle from her father, Ares. Apollodoros (5, 9, 6) reports that Queen Hippolyte received him cordially and, learning the purpose of his visit, promised him the girdle. But Hera (as usual) interferes. In the form of an Amazon she spreads the rumor that Herakles wants to rob the Queen. A battle follows, Herakles kills the Queen and steals her girdle. The Greek word makes clear that this girdle is a military garment, not the usual woman’s girdle. The girdle as military garment appears in folk beliefs31 as the emblem of power and authority; associated with it also is the idea of tying and loosening. Psychologically, the girdle of Ares symbolizes the bond between daughter and war-spirit of the father; it also makes of the daughter a hermaphrodite, a metaphor further reinforced by the circularity of the girdle.
From the fifth century on, vases from southern Italy show a separation between the battle themes and the friendly, conciliatory themes. Here the Aphroditic side of the Amazons, previously repressed, comes forward again. Because the reappearance of the Aphroditic aspect indicates a development in the realm of the collective unconscious, we may deduce a similar change in collective consciousness. In fact, beginning at this time an increased interest in the world of the woman shows itself; this development reaches its high-point in the Hellenistic period.32
From the point of view of masculine psychology, the Amazons represent a compensatory anima figure who is not disposed to throw herself at a man’s feet; this anima figure is self-sufficient and independent of him. She violates the fashionable image of the meek, cuddly, helpless, frightened turtle-dove who, without fail, confirms for her man that he is the crown of all creation. In his encounter with her, the man’s customarily unimaginative erotic pattern soon reaches the limits of its resources.
The Artemis Archetype
We may regard the Amazon myth as an “answer” from the central Mediterranean archetype of the Great Mother to the arrival of the Zeus-religion of the Indo-European invaders. It represents an antithesis to the more patriarchal spirit of these strangers, who overcame the autochthonous population and set themselves up as a nobility class. On the other hand, the mythologem of burning out the right breast plays the role symbolically of a renunciation of the purely feminine and the integration of a masculine component. This integration of the masculine is concretely expressed in their learning ‘male’ crafts and engaging in typically masculine activities. Psychologically, this represents the integration of the animus in its form of directed power, i.e., as will and deed. Emma Jung writes:
For the primitive woman, or the young woman, or for the primitive in every woman, a man distinguished by physical prowess becomes an animus figure. Typical examples are the heroes of legend, or present-day sports celebrities, cowboys, bull fighters, aviators, and so on. For more exacting women, the animus figure is a man who accomplishes deeds, in the sense that he directs his power toward something of great significance. The transitions here are usually not sharp, because power and deed mutually condition one another.33
The figure of Artemis, as she has appeared since the time of Homer, we may consider the product of the confluence of the two religious streams. Her secret androgyny reveals itself not only in her huntress’s garb, but also in her theriomorphic appearance as a horned bitch.
The anima-quality of the Homeric Artemis has been incomparably formulated by W. F. Otto:
It is the starry-bright, flaming, dazzling, agile life and being whose very strangeness draws the man, the more coy it shows itself the stronger its attraction. It is the crystal-clear being whose roots are still hidden in animal nature; the childlike-simple, yet unpredictable, one; the one made of sweet lovability and diamond hardness; maidenly, flighty, unclaspable, and showing sudden harsh opposition; playful, dancing, joking, and (before one can see it coming) implacably earnest; lovingly caring and tenderly concerned with the magic smile that makes up for eternal punishment, yet untamed even to the point of committing dreadful and gruesome acts.34
This eternal image of the paradoxical feminine corresponds in all its traits to untamed, detached, virgin Nature, whose divine inaccessibility assumes the traits of the kallista parthenos ("beautiful maiden").
Originally, Artemis was the great female sovereign of nature. In the time of Homer her archaic traits fell into the background, particularly those of the Great Mother who gives birth to all life, feeds it, and in the end receives it back again into her kingdom. Instead, the sisterly, virginal aspect advances into the foreground. True, she is still maternally and tenderly concerned, but in a more differentiated way than mere brood-protection. In this peculiar aspect she is the guardian of all “becoming,” of all future developments: she stands near those who give birth; she instructs children and educates them; she watches over the growing youth. The virginal-sisterly aspect of her character, however, also includes her coyness, hardness and cruelty. What is for mankind so intimate—the relationship between the sexes—remains totally alien to her. She reserves her worst punishment for sexual attackers. She represents the anima “within,” whose realization is primarily psychological and not biological. Homer names her “shooter of arrows” and “she who strikes at a distance"; this implies the aiming and striking at the essential center of the self, and includes goal-directedness, goal-consciousness, hitting the bulls-eye, and reaching for far-out possibilities.35
The spear of the Goddess is a tellum passionis ("spear of passion"), for all passion means fundamentally a search for self.36 Sexual abstinence, represented by Artemis, warns the man from a natural, but fatal misunderstanding: all too often his concept of a relationship is limited to its sexual aspect. But this is the area of Artemis’s counterpart, Aphrodite—sexual relations, procreation, birth. For the man Aphrodite is the anima “without,” the one leading him into outer entanglements. From her comes, as Otto says,137 the almighty desire that forgets the whole world for the sake of the beloved, that can tear the noblest bonds and break the most sacred trust to be united with its object. This anima works by enchantment. Artemis, on the contrary, works by inspiration and enthusiasm. Aphrodite’s raison d’être, is grounded in the presence of a partner; without him she is superfluous. Artemis, however, is a maiden, independent and self-sufficient.
We must understand virginity in two ways. On the one hand, it connotes the characteristic detachment of youth, including uncommittedness and irresponsible wandering. This kind of virginity in a woman constitutes the companion-piece to the masculine puer aeternus. The puella is a hermaphrodite; she has boyish characteristics. Naturally, she is not conscious of a union of the opposites; rather, she is contaminated, an unconscious mixture. It is well known that this youthful period of transition must be buried at a certain point.
The other form of “being-a-maiden” occurs in the woman who is self-sufficient, whether she be wife, mother, or whatever. She is a person “at one with herself,” as Esther Harding puts it.38 This is the essence of Artemis, symbolically understood. She is precisely not the feminine counterpart to a masculine divinity; her divinity belongs to herself. On the level of personal feminine psychology, this form of virginity is that attitude that makes a woman independent of the “one ought to’s,” those conventional beliefs and practices to which her own viewpoint does not accede. The motive force behind such an independent attitude is not personal; it is directed toward a super-personal goal, toward a relationship to the Goddess.40
Now we can understand the divine Amazon, Artemis, as a new leading-image (Leitbild) in a woman’s process of becoming conscious. From the point of view of masculine psychology, the Goddess represents an incarnation of the anima;41 her daughter-likeness indicates an approach to the personal conscious, just as Christ, the son, stands closer to mankind than Yahweh, the father.
I see the next stage in the development of our myth exemplified in the association of the Amazons with Theseus, the famous Greek hero and King of Athens. For the first and only time in Greek mythology one hears of a close relationship between one of these daughters of Ares and a specific man. (Of course, the wife of Herakles, Deianeira, had an Amazon name, though she was not herself descended from the Amazon race. Deianeira means “man-destroyer,” Apollodoros (1.8.1.) says she was a horse-master and also “a friend of military practice,” as well as a daughter of Dionysos.)
If the king figure represents the dominants within the prevailing collective attitude,42 then the marriage of Theseus indicates that a new aspect of the anima has been included in collective consciousness. This implies a new style of relatedness, or eros. In the person of the Amazon Queen a new leading motif of femininity manifests itself; I would call it the Artemistic motif. I understand by it a greater firmness, self-sufficiency, demureness, and independence in the essence of woman.
This marriage did not last long; Theseus switched his favors to the Cretan Princess, Phaedra. Daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë and sister of Ariadne, Phaedra’s origin looks back to the mother-religion that prevailed before the invasions of the Indo-Europeans. This highly unfortunate marriage causes a regression: at the wedding of Theseus and the Cretan Princess the Amazon was dramatically slaughtered.43 Nevertheless, this first close association between King and Amazon is not allowed to pass without leaving a sign of its existence. A remarkable son, Hippolytus, remained behind as tangible witness to the Amazon. Through the literary tragedy of the same name written by Euripides, Hippolytus achieves immortality, although perhaps he could have gained it on his own as a typical puer aeternus figure.
Now, instead of a daughter standing in the foreground as was customary with the Amazons, it is a son. This son, however, bears the same character traits as his maternal forebears:44 a boundless urge toward untamed nature with its mountains, forests and animals; a fateful association with horses, also expressed in his highly significant name; a bachelor’s typical brittleness and hostility to Aphrodite, and a weakness for hunting and sports in general. Ovid calls him vir amazonius. His chastity, too, which was a by-word in antiquity, identifies him with his maternal inheritance. The chastity of Hippolytus should not be confused with the Christian virtue: it is not acquired but inherited, a natural state of virginity, a sort of natural innocence.45 Hippolytus is therefore maidenly in the same sense as were his Amazon forebears, despite their promiscuity. So, too, women today may remain identified with maidenhood even after years of marriage and the bearing of children.
Of course this attitude of chastity associates him with kallista parthenos, the divine Amazon Artemis, toward whom his whole life is oriented. And she, in turn, loves the youth as her masculine reflection. This fateful tie leads him to disaster. What fascinated him about her was doubtless her mysterious androgenous character, through which she is feminine as well as masculine, mother as well as father, therefore also complete and a bearer of the projection of the self. Psychical completeness is still, for Hippolytus, to be found in a feminine archetype.
We remember that in the country of the Amazons sons were usually murdered, crippled, or given back to their fathers to raise. This treatment does not lend itself to happy prognostications for the sons of Amazons.
The death-aspect of such mothers—Herodotus (4,110) calls them androktonoi, i.e., man-killers—is evident in the collection of sayings about Spartan mothers handed down by Plutarch.46 These mothers seem to have been nothing but brood-mares of warriors, producing sons only to send them out to a probable death. At a certain stage in the development of masculine consciousness this type of anima is valuable: she wakes in a man the mood for conquest and struggle and battle. Another of her aspects materializes in the realization of risky and daring enterprises such as colonization and the founding of sanctuaries and cities. Here the creation of objective values has its source of energy in the Amazon archetype. In this connection we may recall that the conquest of South America by the Spaniards and Portuguese was partly stimulated by the hope of discovering there the legendary realm of these militant women. Columbus reported on this matter already after his first voyage, and the name “Amazon” for the longest river on the continent is a vestige of this expectation.
The Amazon and Creativity
If we consider the mutilation of the Amazons’ sons from the psychological point of view, the ‘mother’ represents in the son the feminine unconscious, the primordial opposite to consciousness, whence derives the motive for mutilation. Generally speaking, this mutilation is a curtailment or sacrifice of the active masculine principle; this transforms the man into a hermaphroditic being, that is, it forcibly activates his feminine side. His androgyny is the consequence of the weakening of his masculinity, just as the androgyny of the Amazon is based on a deprivation of a part of her femininity.
The creative principle personifies itself in the hermaphrodite, bringing to pass not merely an association of psychological opposites but a union of the feminine receptive and masculine formative powers. For masculine psychology the creative process means rapprochement with one’s femininity, or anima. We find this illustrated in mythology by the serving position of Herakles vis-à-vis Omphale, the Lydian Queen, another Amazon figure. On vase paintings we see the hero dressed in the flowery tunic of the Queen, while she has put on his lion skin. She forces him to take up spinning and hits him with her sandal when she is dissatisfied with his work.
I believe there is a hint that our myth as a whole hangs together with a creative fantasy in the collective unconscious: this fantasy later presses concretely through into consciousness. Let us explore this creative aspect by returning for a moment to the land of the Amazons’ origin.
The hierosgamos between Ares and Harmonia occurred in the grove of Akmon. Akmon was one of the Idaic Daktyls, “the Tom Thumb (Däumling) who lives in the wood.”47 The Daktyls were the first well-known metallurgists on earth; they learned thei art from the Idaic méter (Great Mother), whose helpers they were. Akmon is the personification of the anvil. Then there is also a circumstantial association with the river Thermodon, which means “altogether warm.”48 Furthermore, the immediate neighbors of the Amazons, to the West, were the legendary Chalyber, the blackshith folk par excellence of antiquity. They were supposedly named after Chalybs, a son of Ares. Chalybs means “steel” in Greek.
Mythical smithies traditionally have some form of physical defect; they limp, or are one-legged, or have only one eye; sometimes they are dwarfish or unspeakably ugly. These cripplings seem to relate to an initiation ritual into the mystery societies of the smiths.49 Mircea Eliade remarks in The Forge and the Crucible that the divinities who were depicted as invalids (e.g., Hephaistos) were associated with the "strangers", the “mountain folk,” the “subterranean dwarfs,” i.e., with mountain populations of unfamiliar character who were surrounded by mystery and often identified as uncanny, mighty smiths.50 This holds true precisely for the Chalyber: the area around the Pontic Thermodon is not only unusually mountainous and forested, it is also rich in minerals, and the inhabitants practiced the metallurgical craft (according to Valerius Flaccus) in underground caverns. It is noteworthy, also, that modern research51 places the birthplace of iron-working in the mountainous region of Armenia, between Tauros and Kaukasus, in the region of the mythical Amazonic kingdom. In the annotation to the third canto, verse 189, of the Iliad the Amazon Queen Otrere ("the swift") is identified as the daughter of the nymph Armenia and Ares. Finally, one notes that Lysias52 presents the Amazons as the only nation that armed its troops with iron weapons.
The significance of the invention of iron metallurgy can hardly be overestimated. For the first time tools became so inexpensive that they could be easily acquired for the improvement of the environment, especially for clearing the land and tilling the soil.53 The appearance of iron altered the face of the earth. Not only did it provide a new material for military applications, weaponry; it also gave mankind a better weapon with which to wage the fight for survival. The fundamental thought of metallurgy lies in the idea of bringing incomplete nature to completion through an accelerated process.54 Metallurgy therefore is a kind of proto-alchemy. This cultural advance through iron metallurgy implies that the Amazon archetype plays a role in the expansion of consciousness.55
Our examination of the literary tradition of these warrior women brings out those characteristics of temperament that, in our culture, we call masculine. In the eyes of patriarchal Greek society the hunt, horse-breeding, warfare and colonization—the highest masculine values—brought about a higher valuation of the feminine precisely within this scale of values. But from the feminine point of view, this higher valuation takes place by approximating masculine ideals or by largely obliterating the culturally determined, psychic sex differentiation, a process we can follow in our own contemporary society. The real purpose of this obliterating process may be to prove that it is not the solution to the problematical relation of the sexes.
As Jung puts it in Answer to Job,56 the masculine ideal implies perfection, which is at the same time a fundamental offense against the feminine principle of incompleteness, or all-inclusiveness. The more the feminine deviates in the direction of the masculine, Jung says, the more woman loses the possibility to compensate for the masculine proclivity toward perfection. The resulting situation is ideal from a masculine point of view, but it is threatened by a complete reversal into its opposite.
During the mutual assimilation process, as we are now experiencing it, a host of prejudices about earlier sex roles will have to be thrown overboard. The standard definition of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the result of a massive collective projection. The projection does not lie where a first glance indicates, i.e., in biological or sociological conditions, but in the psychic polarity between Luna and Sol.
To the most unyielding prejudices of our society belong those concerning the typical relations between the sexes. Within the collective consciousness of the Christian West it is taken for granted that the man is the dominant partner, the bold, objective, active, aggressive one. The woman, however, is characterized eo ipso by subjectivity, passivity, receptivity, and sensitiveness. Thus, certain character traits get accepted collectively and become constitutive for the one sex and bluntly denied to the other; or, should the other show them, such behavior gets labeled abnormal. Even psychology is often quick to apply the term “animus” (as an epithet of contempt) to an aggressive woman.
This sexual dichotomy can just as well be nonexistent: man and woman can both have identical traits, which in our culture would get divided into masculine and feminine; or there might be a complete reversal of sex differentiation, as in the myth of the Amazons. Credit for elucidating this point belongs to the ethnological field workers, especially to Margaret Mead.57
In the northern part of our culture these prejudices are more or less falling apart. As is usual in such times of declining cultural norms, a widespread sense of disorientation has set in. There is confusion as to what is masculine and what feminine. Our helplessness before this problem shows also in the scarcity of possible solutions. Only two are prevalent: either a kind of obliteration of the sex role through a sell-out of the woman to the traditional role of the man, or a complete inversion, as exemplified by the Amazon myth.
Pseudo-solutions—such as those practiced in Scandinavia where a so-called division of labor exists, with the husband caring for household and children for half the day and pursuing a career during the other half—are unsatisfactory. Given the stage of our psychological consciousness, they are too concrete. They keep the problem fixed on the level where it appears as a psychic projection and where its solutions are literal. What is called for is the integration of the opposite sexes within. That demands a full-fledged transformation of the whole person through an expansion of consciousness, and not a sexual conversion to an opposite role, an enantiodromia, which is so typical for purely unconscious conflicts.
One can see a materialization of this problem in the recent change in physical build, especially among young women. It is reinforced by clothing fashions. The approximation to the young-boy phenotype is astonishing. Presumably we are emerging into an age of the hermaphrodite. Does this mean we will see concrete expressions of the preliminary stages of a greater integration in each individual of animus and anima? But is it not a misunderstood psychic reality expressing itself concretely, the bodily manifestation of a process in the soul, a process in which such bodily changes come about through the displacement of psychic energies?
Our time shows itself seemingly favorably disposed to what I earlier described as the Artemis female type. But this type has no ready model at hand, and the Artemis-influenced women of today are in many cases simply animus-possessed. This, too, may be a transition stage whose purpose is to stimulate consciousness by creating a necessary disharmony within a passive attitude. The persistent, self-affirming prototype in our culture still remains that of the childbearer and mother. Beside this ideé force all others fade away or show themselves at closer scrutiny to be merely approximations to the patriarchal spirit. For this reason, women for whom motherhood would be a second-best become mothers anyway as their first choice, merely because motherhood and femininity are still identified. For such women it would be a great advantage if they grasped the notion that they might in reality be standing under the star of the Goddess of the Hunt; accepting this aspect of the transcendent personality is for them a precondition for the later experience of Aphroditic eros.
Artemis is not a mother in the sense of giving birth but rather of protecting the seedling, the new thing that is only beginning to develop. This holds true both in the concrete and in the spiritual sense. The form of behavior that expresses itself through her includes also an impetus in the realm of feeling. I would call it “Artemistic eros.” This form of eros is a decisive condition for the development of a man's relationship to the anima. A too unconscious-passive condition of the woman drives him compensatorily into a too greatly extraverted activism, which leaves his soul neglected.
But here we touch on an unexpected, profound difficulty. The two Goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis, in a metaphorical sense a mother and a daughter, each an archetypal pattern of femininity, stand hostile to each other already in antiquity. The hatred they cherish for each other comes to a drastic head in Euripides’s Hippolytus. This conflict between feminine dominants constitutes the religious quintessence of the tragedy.58 Similar to Yahweh in Job, the female Goddesses want to remain unconscious of their shadow sides. Giving a reason for the catastrophe, Artemis makes the following speech at the end of the play:
For it was Aphrodite who, to satisfy her resentment, willed that all this should happen; and there is a law among gods, that no one of us should seek to frustrate another's purpose, but let well alone.59 (1327–30)
If one were to ask, for what type of man is the Artemistic eros an essential condition for development of the anima? I should answer by referring to Hippolytus: especially for the puer aeternus, whose religious background M.-L. von Franz has sketched in such an impressive way.60 With Euripides the intra-divine conflict lacks a resolution and therefore leaves the puer aeternus without a solution to his dilemma. Therein lies a probable reason why the incarnation of the feminine God-image, and eo ipso of the anima, has remained stuck more or less since antiquity.61
What we said about motherhood leads to a further reflection. Next to the threat of annihilation through atomic and chemical warfare, the population explosion is our most pressing threat. Is it far-fetched to think that nature itself, which compensates the lack of instinct in consciousness, will intervene in this fateful process? I am led to imagine that through the constellation of a femininity represented by the archetype of the Divine Huntress the heretofore stubbornly predominant leitmotiv of motherhood may become obsolete. Perhaps even a lot of what we call in psychotherapy “negative mother-complex in women” gets misvalued because our consciousness is still too prejudiced to see Artemis and the Amazon in the archetypal background.
NOTES
* In memory of Franz Riklin.
1. Munich, Museum antiker Kleinkunst, No. 2688 (c. 450 B.C.); cf. also K. Kerényi, The Heroes of the Greeks, New York, 1959, pl. 73.
2. Toeppfer (in Pauly, Realencyclopädie d. Class. Altertumswissensch., vol. 1, under “Amazones”) remarks that this is one of the most difficult and most disputed problems in the study of Greek mythology.
3. Cf. also R. Henning, “Über die voraussichtlich völkerkundlichen Grundlagen der Amazonensagen und deren Verbreitung,” in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 72 (1940), pp. 362–71; and A. Rosenthal, "The Isle of the Amazons: A Marvel of Travellers," in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 1 (1937).
4. In Kritische Untersuchungen, I, Berlin, 1852, p. 275.
5. Homer, Iliad, Bk. 3, 184ff; Bk. 6, 186.
6. Diodorus Siculus II, 45, 1ff.; Strabo 11, 5, 1; on the founding of the temple in Ephesus: Kall. hymn in Dian. 237ff.
7. Cf. K. Hoenn, Artemis, Zürich, 1946, pp. 19, 28, 143.
8. Der Kleine Pauly, Lexikon der Antike, vol. 2, Stuttgart, 1967, under “Dionysos.”
9. Homer, Hym. 27.
10. Euripides, Bacchae, 1189ff.
11. Cf. W. F. Otto, Dionysus, Bloomington, 1956, p. 109.
12. Plutarch, Quaest. Graec. 56.
13. Op. cit., Kleine Pauly.
14. Lysias (Epitaph. 4), bringing out their valor and bravery, asserts that the Amazons invented horseback riding and were the only nation toemploy iron weapons.
15. M. Delcourt, Hermaphrodite, London, 1961, p. 26.
16. Apollodorus Rhodius II, 990ff.
17. Plutarch, Amat. 23.
18. Scholium ad Hom. Iliad, III, 189.
19. J. Wiesner, Olympos, Darmstadt, 1960, p. 185. Etymologically, harmonia = unification, juncture, bond, order. The derivative verb harmonizo = to bring together, to form, to shape. The essential root is the common Indo-Germanic ar = to join, to unite. Generally, this syllable indicates the unification of opposing things or different things into an ordered whole. Related is the noun harma = chariot, esp. war-chariot, team (of horses). Also: Latin arma = weapons, armor; armentum = herd, flock; arm. y-arma = fitting, fitted; old Indic irma = front, bow of a ship; Latin armus = the upper arm; got arms = arm. Cf. H. Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg, 1960, under “harmonia.”
20. Cf. J. Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern, 1959, p. 336f.
21 Homer, Hym. 8.
22. Homer, Iliad, Bk. 1, 193ff. Cf. also W. F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, New York, 1954, р. 48.
23. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 8, par. 241.
24. Otto, Homeric Gods, p. 24 (my translation from the German).
25. Ibid., p. 24.
26. C. G. Jung, Childrens’ Dreams Seminar, Zurich, 1939–40, private limited printing, p. 65.
27. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 7, par. 298ff.
28. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 9.2, par. 41; cf. also Emma Jung and M.-L. von Franz, Die Graalslegende in psychologischer Sicht, Zurich, 1960, p. 66ff.
29. Ovid, Amor., 1, 9, 1.
30. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 10, par. 261ff.
31. Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 3, Berlin, 1930/31, under “Gürtel.”
32. The Amazon presents not only the exaggeration of a latent possibility within the feminine psyche but also the absolute reversal of predominating sexual roles in Classical Greece. The Greek woman was more or less enslaved: her relation to her family, her relation to her husband (whom she certainly did not choose), and her position in society at large were all of a piece in this respect. With no chance for education, she lived under virtual house arrest. If it happened that she was superfluous in the family, i.e., unmarriageable, she was sold into slavery by her father or brother. Should such a likelihood be obvious at birth, her father would refuse to recognize her and thrust her out to die. Greek society of the classical period offered no opportunity for independence or self-sufficiency to an adult woman of good family: no middle way existed between either becoming the mother of a brood of children or becoming an old maid, which was a burden to others and a family rarity. This repressive attitude in society implies an equal unrelatedness to the inner world of the feminine unconscious, which reacts on its part in a rejecting, aggressive way, thus underlining its autonomy towards consciousness. (cf. U. E. Paoli, Die Frau im alten Hellas, Bern, 1955, p. 40ff.)
33. Emma Jung, Animus and Anima, Spring Publications, New York/Zurich, 1957, p. 3.
34. Otto, Homeric Gods, pp. 89–90 (my translation from the German).
35. Jung and Von Franz, Die Graalslegende, p. 87.
36. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 16, par. 353ff.
37. Otto, Homeric Gods, p. 96.
38. M. E. Harding, Women’s Mysteries, New York, 1955, p. 125.
39. Ibid., p. 125.
40. Ibid., 126.
41. M.-L. von Franz, A Psychological Interpretation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, Spring Publications, New York/Zurich, chap. 5, p. 13.
42. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 14, par. 349ff.
43. Apollodorus, Epit. 1.17.
44. Cf. W. Fauth, Hippolytos und Phaidra, Abhandl. d. Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Mainz, 1958, p. 574.
45. 45 K. Kerényi, Apollon, Düsseldorf, 1953, p. 58.
46. Plutarch, Mor. 24c seq.
47. Cf. B. Hemberg, “Die idäischen Daktylen,” Eranos 5O (1952), pp. 44–59.
48. Cf. R. Malamud, “Zum ‘Hippolytos’ des Euripides,” Diploma Thesis, C. G. Jung Institute Zurich, 1968.
49. M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, London, 1962, p. 105.
50. Ibid., p. 105.
51. R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology, vol. 9, Leiden, 1964, p. 216.
52. Epitaph. 4.
53. Forbes, Studies, vol. 8, p. 30.
54. Eliade, The Forge.
55. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 8, par. 111.
56. C. G. Jung, Coll. Works 11, par. 627.
57. M. Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, London, 1935.
58. Malamud, “Zum ‘Hippolytos.’ ”
59. Euripides, Hippolytus, Penguin Books, 1953, p. 66.
60. M.-L. von Franz, “Über religiöse Hintergründe des Puer-Aeternus-Problems,” in Guggenbühl-Craig, ed., The Archetype, Basel/New York, 1964.
61. M.-L. von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, Zurich, 1957, p. 174.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1971): 1–21
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