HERA: BOUND AND UNBOUND
To speak of “instinct” with respect to human beings and human behavior has been outmoded for some decades, yet it has remained in usage as a term among depth psychologists, less for its technical accuracy and scientific precision than for its connotation of depth.1 To speak of instinct refers us to a dimension of being human that is deep, intractable, basic. Instinct refers to that portion of our being that “does not change”2 and will not be transformed into something else or sublimated to other goals. Whatever in human behavior and fantasy that relates to instinct possesses the qualities of uniformity and regularity, manifests itself as a compelling necessity, and acts like a reflex, i.e., compulsively.3 By connecting archetypal images firmly to instincts, we root them deeply in the ground of human being, linking them up irrefragably with basic process and basic need. This move has the function and the effect of “earthing” psyche in solid human soil. Jung, in some passages at least, argues for a very close, though not mechanical or reductive, relation between instinct and archetypal image, and in one passage he defines the archetypal image as “the instinct’s perception of itself.”4
In our engagements with archetypal images, such as that Great Goddess of Greek myth, Hera, with which this paper is concerned, we must cast a glance, therefore, backward and downward toward the instinctual background out of which an image cluster arises, of which it is the differentiated perception. The stories and rites surrounding Hera will tell us something about the vicissitudes of the instinct5 of which she is the image. Who will deny that Hera’s behavior shows instinctual process, i.e., regularity, compelling necessity, compulsivity? If we can settle at the outset, at least provisionally, the instinct which plays through the ways of Hera, we will have in hand the means for understanding, from the essential heart of the matter outward, the more peripheral phenomena associated with the core of this archetypal image.
The history and meaning of the Hera image in Greek religion has been the subject of scholarly discussion and dispute."6 That the pre-Homeric Hera was substantially different from the classical Hera is generally conceded; Homer stamped her image indelibly in the Iliad.7 The original material for the Homeric portrait was furnished by a widespread Hera cult which existed in Greece prior to the eighth century, the “mother temple” being located in Argos.
As to the nature of the pre-Homeric and original Hera image, three alternative views have been suggested and debated. W. H. Roscher, the nineteenth-century mythographer, proposed that Hera was originally a moon-Goddess and only secondarily a Goddess of marriage.8 Karl Kerényi, whose work on Hera we shall rely on throughout this paper, also took up the connection of Hera to moon symbolism, but he did not subsume her role as patroness of marriage under the rubric of moon-Goddess.9
A second view has been put forward by W. K. C. Guthrie. This scholar argues that Hera was originally an earth-Goddess, much like Demeter, and that her role of marriage-Goddess derives from “her more fundamental character as a goddess of fecundity.”10 Jane Harrison found the same sort of identity between the archaic Hera figure and an earth-mother, Demeterian figure: Hera was “the fruits of the Year incarnate.”11
The third view, which is the one I accept, is put forth by a variety of scholars: Cook, Rose, Farnell, and Kerényi. This view holds that Hera was from the beginning basically a Goddess of marriage and that all other functions of womanhood—the fertility and reproductive as well as the child-rearing functions—are in Hera secondary to her primary characterization as wife. As Kerényi puts it: “The minimal but sure definition that can be given of Hera … is that among the archetypal images of Greek religion Hera was the wife.”12This position holds that Hera imaged “wifehood” as her essential mode of being, even before her union with Zeus, a union that was probably rooted in the historical circumstance of a uniting of Hera and Zeus cults in eighth-century times.13 Both Cook and Kerényi cite evidence for the existence of consorts for each of them before they became mates to each other, so that even in these archaic, pre-Zeus times Hera constituted in the imagination of her devotees the image of “wife.” As wife, Hera was naturally from time to time involved in activities having to do with child-birth (she was said to attend women in child-birth), but this is secondary to her more fundamental character as wife. Homer’s characterization of Hera is therefore consonant with her oldest traditions and does not represent a distorted selection of one function out from the broad range of functions and activities characteristic of a fertility Goddess, for whom marriage is after all quite unnecessary and at most secondary to her primary telos. The telos of Hera is gamos (marriage), and her central symbols and the predominant rituals of her cult have to do with her marriage ceremony, the hieros gamos in which she is united with Zeus.14
The instinct of which the Hera image, as an archetypal image, is a “perception of itself” must therefore be characterized as a “mating instinct.” The “compelling necessity” of this instinct drives toward completion in marriage, toward marital union. Here we must be careful to avoid reducing the mating instinct, of which Hera is the archetypal image, to either a) a biological drive toward reproduction, nature’s way of maintaining the species (fertility Goddess, Demeter), or b) a purely sexual drive toward release of tension in sexual union (sensuality Goddess, Aphrodite). Sexuality and reproduction certainly enter the field of the Hera constellation, but they must be understood from the viewpoint of what is more fundamental to her essence, namely gamos and wifehood. Around this specification of Hera as archetype of mate and mating all the other phenomena in her field must be arranged. And her existence as an archetypal image gives to “mating” the status, the depth, and the force of “instinct.”
As we proceed to look at the historical development of the Hera image in Greek religion and imagination, and at the final outcome of the archetypal image in Homer and in the classical period, we are looking also at the vicissitudes of the “mating instinct.” All the phenomena of Hera—the stories, the rites, the associations—belong to and comment upon this core issue, and all of them must be understood as symbolical commentaries on this theme.
This is especially true of the so-called pathology of Hera—her jealousy, her vindictiveness, her shrewishness, her pathogenic mothering, her plotting. All of these reflect back on the central issue, which is the instinct of mating and its vicissitudes in this particular historical situation. To understand the vicissitudes of this image is not to excuse the pathology or to gloss over these shadow elements, but it is to recognize and to appreciate the pathos of Hera and to take note of the heights and depths of which the mating instinct is capable. The fate of Hera and of mating libido in the Greek context is tragic and pathetic. The remainder of this paper will be devoted to understanding some of the aspects of this tragedy and indirectly to extracting some of the meanings of Hera’s pathos as they relate to the contemporary situation of men and women in our culture.
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The Stymphalians in Arcadia knew Hera by three names: Parthenos or Pais (“virgin” or “girl”), Teleia (“perfect one” and “fulfilled”), and Chera (“widow”). The second term, Teleia, refers to Hera just after her wedding, for “in marriage she attained perfection.”15 In this connection, Zeus was referred to as Teleios, “bringer to perfection,” since as bridegroom he brought his sister-wife, Hera, to fulfilment.
Besides having the effect of allowing Hera to achieve a wide appeal among women of all ages and statuses (“all women, whatever their condition, worshipped her”16), these three epithets refer to a certain rhythm in the archetype. In her cults Hera underwent periodic recurring weddings. Before each of them her image would be immersed in a “bridal bath” (traditionally the spring Kanathos), and this immersion would restore her virginity. In the subsequent wedding ritual Hera achieved her “perfection” (Teleia). This high point would then be followed by a dispute or misunderstanding with her husband Zeus, or at any rate by rupture and separation, and Hera, going into retreat or hiding from Zeus, would be referred to as Chera (“widow”). When it came time for the cycle to repeat itself, the image of Hera would have to be “found,” taken to the bridal bath, restored, etc. Kerényi relates these three phases in the rhythm of the archetype to the phases of the moon and to the woman’s menstrual cycle, and he adds a forth phase to the rhythm, the “secret time” of new moon and menses. Marriages even still in classical times traditionally took place in the month of Gamelion, Hera’s month (roughly our January), during the time of full moon. Opposite to this “high time” in the cycle was its nadir, the moon’s darkness, which was imagined as “a voluntary journey of Hera through the underworld.”17 In this phase, Hera became a Queen of the Underworld, hence her association with the pomegranate. Corresponding to this is the image of “Iuno inferna” in Roman myth.18
If we avoid the danger at this point of reducing Hera to a moon-Goddess or to a seasonal vegetation-Goddess, but rather understand the lunar and seasonal rhythms as attaching themselves by association to the Hera archetype because they appropriately symbolize this archetype’s inherent rhythm, we come closer to grasping the essence and vicissitudes of the instinct which this image reflects. The charming remark of an Abyssinian woman as noted down by Leo Frobenius and quoted by Kerényi tells only partially of this rhythm: “A good wife is before every love-making a girl but a mother afterwards.”19 This catches the flavor of the early phases of the rhythmic pattern, but it misses the downside beat, the Hera Chera and the Iuno inferna. It is in connection with this downside part of the rhythm that we come upon the so-called pathology of Hera.
As we attempt to differentiate the behavior and attitudes of Hera that belong inherently to the downside of the archetype’s rhythm from what in her behavior and attitude is an exacerbation of this downside phase, motivated by the behavior and attitude of her spouse, we come upon two very different images of Hera: the pre-Homeric, ancient cultic image and the Homeric, classical image. In the cultic image, so eloquently and meticulously rendered by Kerényi in Zeus and Hera: Archetypal Image of Husband, Father, and Wife, we find a regular rhythm through the phases, with a strong accent on the motifs of recurring virginity, hieros gamos, and Hera Teleia, with Zeus regularly performing the function of Teleios, the “bringer to perfection.” In all phases of her existence Hera is seen in relation to conjugal union, a perfect expression of the mating instinct fulfilled. As Kerényi puts it:
Parthenos and Pais, “virgin” and “girl,” in the Hera myth by no means had the simple meaning of being without a man, without the brother-husband! Rather these names meant secret love-making with him, such as Homer knew about and was the subject of a special tradition in Samos. There it was related that this condition lasted for three hundred years. In Hera the woman and wife was always present from the beginning, in all the forms of a woman’s fancy, without her thereby becoming polygamous. It is only the designation “Chera,” “widow,” that requires us to assume a low point without a man in the round dance of the three phases handed down to us so clearly.20
Moreover, during the Chera phase, which was clearly perceived as the dangerous period of the cycle, Hera was “bound”:
It was no doubt in her most dangerous aspect that Hera, like Artemis, was bound. This would be the aspect that became effective at new moon in the seclusion of the lygos bushes and had to be curbed in its power. It was the Prosymna and “Iuno inferna” aspect in a quite archaic form and treatment … this most striking feature of the ritual, the tying up of the statue of the goddess, was followed by her being untied and bathed.21
The lygos bush was associated with sobriety and restraint: lygos meant “to withdraw into the sphere of sobriety. The lygos checked the sexual urge, so we learn from ancient medical writings.”22 The lygos also was said to stimulate menses, and sexual abstinence during menstruation was strictly enforced so as to avoid pollution and its attendant dangers.23 Thus did the ancient cult of the Great Goddess of marriage maximize the happy, constructive phases of the cycle and guard against dangerous ones. In this ancient image the accent falls on “a contented and rejoicing Hera, after her underworld phase.”24
The other image of Hera, derived largely from Homeric and classical writings, places the accent with great stress on the downside portion of the cycle. It is the image of Hera “unbound,” in her aspects as Chera and inferna: viciously vindictive, insanely jealous, a pathogenic mother, certainly anything but “contented and rejoicing.” This is a Hera within the context of a regnant patriarchy. “The human model for Homer’s portrait,” writes Kerényi, “is the simplest patriarchal family, in which the father of the house can chastise his wife if he pleases,”25 and apparently it often pleased him to do so. Gone is the generous, coequal Hera Teleia of the previous epoch; the shrew is center stage. With acid irony Philip E. Slater titled his indictment of classical Greek society The Glory of Hera. Misogyny, he argues, was the worm at the core of that society, and the long list of the pathological characteristics rampant in the males of fifth-century Athens—narcissism, homosexuality, overweening pride (hubris), competitiveness, even schizophrenia!—is laid flatly at the door of this woman- and wife-degrading attitude. In Slater’s view, the angry, conflicted, and humiliated women who had to play wife and mother to these wretched specimens of the male sex are the proximate cause of this sick state of affairs; the ultimate cause is the attitude of the patriarchal society toward women. Thus Hera, as the image of this persecuted woman, is both victim and victimizer, and in her victimization of her children she is fighting back against the victimization dealt her.
Slater’s study is not directly relevant to this paper, since I am not interested here in elucidating the relation between Greek myth and fifth-century Athenian society, but it does offer some help with respect to differentiating the two Hera images and to answering the question of what motivates the change from the first to the second. If the Hera image symbolizes the “mating instinct,” the dynamis toward the gamos and the vicissitudes of this instinct, then we find in the second, later Hera the results of that instinct frustrated. The rhythm inherent in the Hera archetype, which moves to and from the gamos and always in relation to the gamos, is disturbed in the later image of Hera. This second Hera is almost exclusively a Hera Chera and a Iuno inferna, and the rhythm is stuck in these destructive phases because the central object and goal of the instinct has been thwarted. By Zeus. Zeus is no longer Teleios, “Bringer to perfection,” for Hera but rather her Ateleios, “thwarter of fulfilment.”
It is not a question here of a patriarchal Zeus thwarting the wishes of a strong-willed Hera who must have her way in all things, nor is it a matter of a patriarchal religion dominating a matriarchal one. The nub of the issue is rather that Zeus thwarts Hera in a specific way, i.e., he will not allow her to find her “perfection” and fulfilment in gamos; he will not be married to her in more than a token way, nor allow her to be deeply married to him. It is this that makes a Chera (“widow”) of Hera and constellates her infernal destructiveness. For a Hera, a token, merely official “husband” is worse than no husband at all, and it arouses in her a far grimmer sort of destructiveness than would the sadness and disappointment of eternal maidenhood.
That Zeus understands his husbandhood in this merely token sense is expressed by him in two ways fundamentally, both of them having to do with the issue of offspring: his flirtations with nymphs and human women which result in progeny, and his own independent “motherhood.” The flirtations of Zeus and his fathering of children with other paramours, and his independent mothering (“birthing”) of Dionysos and Athene, cast Hera into her widowhood, her Chera phase. To this she reacts with great strenuousness: systematically and viciously persecuting the paramours and their children, attempting parthenogenesis on her own, chastising her faithless husband verbally before the other Olympians, etc. But we must not mistake these reactions of Hera’s for the results of frustrated maternity on her part (“he won’t give me a baby!”), for maternity is at best secondary to her primary aim of gamos. In this instance, however, thwarted maternity with her husband Zeus underscores his thwarting of her compulsive drive toward gamos with him.
It would be an error to see the “second Hera,” the shrew, as the reaction of the Hera archetype to a patriarchal situation per se. As far as Hera is concerned, marriage is a sacred act culminating in “perfection” (Hera Teleia) under any social circumstances. Even in fifth-century Athens “the contracting of marriage … was a sacred act owed to Hera and performed in her honor”; Hera was “exemplary for Athenian brides, whose patriarchal families saw to it that their Gamos was as ‘sacred’ as possible, that is, assimilated to the Gamos of Hera.”26 Moreover, as Kerényi points out, the ancient Hera cult at Olympos (which was at that location before the appearance of the Zeus cult) welcomed the patriarchal Zeus as the new consort of their Deity; quite the contrary of being rejected as an alien and threatening power, Zeus “was gladly accepted by the worshipers of Hera in place of the mere Parastates, who was only a servant of women.”27 Originally, therefore, Zeus was seen as a mate more fitting to the status of the Goddess than had been her earlier consort. But given the patriarchal social system, the union of man and wife was rendered complete only with the appearance of a son. Without a son the wife was still merely “potential,” not a proper wife in the fullest sense. And to be wife in this sense is all of Hera’s desire. Kerényi describes the situation on Olympos as follows:
Zeus and Hera are the archetypal couple, Zeus the man and husband, even the brother-husband, Hera the woman and wife, yet characterized only as woman and wife, not as mother. It is for this reason that the patriarchal triangle was not properly completed in the Olympian divine family … What is missing is the “son” who might unite this couple in a patriarchal sense as a worthy firstborn.28
Without a son in this social system, wifehood is not yet a “full fact.” Not motherhood per se, but wifehood, is Hera’s telos; given another social system in which a son or child were not essential for full wife-hood status, Hera could be fully Teleia without children.
As it turns out, Hera does have children, but her children have nothing whatever to do with her fulfilment and perfection; they are her revenge. None of them springs from the bounty of wifehood, and none symbolizes the fruit and completion of gamos. All of them are the progeny of Hera Chera and Iuno inferna, the widow and the Queen of the Underworld. To do justice to a discussion of Hera’s children would require a much longer study than this one; here I will only comment on some of them.
If we consider the children of Hera from the standpoint of our theme, the mating archetype-instinct and its vicissitudes, we will understand them as symbolizations of the “contents” born out of this archetype as it moves through its own inherent phases and as it reacts to the “Zeus factor.” It is essential to keep in mind both dynamics—the inherent and the reactive—for both in fact flow together to motivate these births. These particular reactions (births) would not be possible without Hera’s nature being what it is; on the other hand, Hera’s nature would not on its own give birth to these children without the particular stimuli and irritations motivating it from the side of Zeus.
The sons of Hera give us a portrait of animus reaction, but it is a reaction that comes from the depths of potentiality in the archetype itself. There is a story told by the Hellenistic poet Euphorion which identifies the mother of Prometheus as Hera. This is a variation on the usual genealogy of this archetypal rebel and opponent of Zeus, which has it that the Titan Iapetos was his father and Klymene was his mother. Klymene is a name for the Queen of the Underworld.29 In the variation told by Euphorion, Hera is identified as this Queen of the Underworld (her Iuno inferna aspect), and the giant Eurymedon is identified as the father: “By him Hera is said to have become the mother of this son who so well fitted her hostile phase.”30 (In this variation we can see, it seems to me, the way in which a mythologem draws originally foreign material into its orbit and assimilates this new material. This is the “magnetic effect” of the archetype, the “pull” that it exerts on foreign, though “fitting,” material. The result of this association and assimilation process is a fuller image of the archetype’s total range.)
If Hera and Zeus ever did have a child together it was Ares. There is some ambiguity about Ares’s parentage, Homer averring him to be a son of Zeus and Hera, Ovid however claiming that Hera was his sole parent. Even the Homeric text places this son closer to his mother than to his father: Zeus practically disowns him, saying that “he hated Ares because he took his pleasure only in strife, war and battles and because he resembled his mother Hera, so that his proper place was amongst the Titans, in the deepest depths of Tartaros.”31 Ares “takes after his mother,” then, symbolizing her blood-thirsty rage, her insensitivity to justice (Themis), her vainglorious inflation, her childish weakness in actual combat, and her fearful jealousy.32 Slater’s The Glory of Hera can be read as a critique of Ares and of a whole society (fifth-century Athens) possessed by this animus of Hera. Of these Athenian men Slater writes: “They were quarrelsome as friends, treacherous as neighbors, brutal as masters, faithless as servants, shallow as lovers,”33 these are the children of Hera Chera.
Another son of Hera’s, who according to Hesiod has no father, is Hephaistos, the crippled God of forges and smithies. The child of her own womb, Hephaistos is the most promising of Hera’s progeny and the one most deeply rejected by her.34 Her rejection of him symbolizes her rejection of the possibilities for the type of animus development he embodies, i.e., individual creativity of a deeply introverted sort. That Hera can gave birth to such a son indicates this potentiality within the archetype, but it is merely a tangential possibility and quite off the mark of her central goal, which is perfection in marriage. Were the central goal achieved, a Hera Teleia, a “contented and rejoicing Hera,” could connect more positively and constructively to this child of her womb as a promising animus possibility for herself.
Hera’s most fearful reproduction is the monster Typhaon, “dreadful and baneful Typhaon, a scourge to mortals, whose aspect resembled neither god’s nor man’s.”35 The story of this birth, more than any of the others, speaks to the central issue of Hera’s frustration in marriage. The birth of Typhaon is the direct result of Zeus’s thwarting her achievement of full wifehood with him, her essential telos. The story of Typhaon’s birth is worth examining in detail, for it offers us a sharp insight both into the reactive response of Hera and into images which pertain to the depths of her Chera and inferna aspects.
The episode is motivated by Zeus, who independently of Hera gives birth to Athene. At this
mighty Hera was quickly angeredand spoke to the gathering of the immortal gods:“All gods and all goddesses, hear from mehow cloud-gathering Zeus begins to dishonor mefirst, since he made me his mindfully devoted wife,and now apart from me gave birth to gray-eyed Athena,who excels among the blessed immortals.O stubborn and wily one! What else will you now devise?How dared you alone give birth to gray-eyed Athena?Would not I have borne her?—I, who was called your very ownamong the immortals who dwell in the broad sky?”36
In this passage, one hears the anger of Hera, but the deeper note is pathos: “Would not I have borne her?—I, who was called your very own among the immortals who dwell in the broad sky?” Zeus’s betrayal of her is here not infidelity with another paramour; it is rather his full assertion of independence from her. In stating his self-sufficiency he is asserting too his independence from wedlock; committed to an “inward-leading anima,”37 he has chosen another and has widowed Hera. The rhythmic pattern of the Hera archetype shifts now from its Teleia phase to its Chera phase:
And now, I shall contrive to have born to mea child who will excel among the immortals.And to our sacred wedlock I shall bring no shame,nor visit your bed, but shall pass my timefar from youm among immortal gods.38
And so the wanderings of Hera Chera begin. For a full year Hera
never came to the bed of contriving Zeusnor pondered for him sagacious counsel,sitting as before on her elaborate chair,but staying in temples, where many pray,cow-eyed, mighty Hera delighted in her offerings.39
Having prayed to Earth and Sky and having “lashed the earth with her stout hand,” she was granted a parthenogenic conception, and during this year she gestated.
But when the months and the days reached their destined goal,and the seasons arrived as the year revolved,she bore dreadful and baneful Typhaon, a scourge to mortals …40
At this point the cycle deepens to its nadir, to its inferna aspect:
Forthwith cow-eyed, mighty Hera took him ard, piling evil upon evil,she commended him to the care of the she-dragon.41
This compounding of “evil upon evil” is imaged in the conjunction of Typhaon and the she-dragon. The she-dragon is
a great, glutted and fierce monster, which inflictedmany evils on the men of the land,—many of themand many on their slender-shanked sheep; for she was bloodthirsty.42
The rhetoric of this passage, with its three-fold repetition of “many,” gives great force to the destructive potentialities of Hera in her Iuno inferna aspect. We have in this conjunction of evil forces, one male and the other female, a potent symbolization of the “intolerable image,”43 an image of such devastating quality, power, and proportion that we could well place it at the source of radical psychotic process.44 To analyze it psychologically, it is the fierce potency of a negative animus (Typhaon) combining with and motivating the latent (and not so latent) potentiality for destruction in the depths of the feminine aspect of the psyche (the she-dragon, who is Hera as Iuno inferna). It is a conjunction of evil and destructiveness without a single redeeming feature:
He worked many evils on the glorious races of men,and she brought their day of doom to those who met her …”45
This compounding of evil upon evil is an image of Hera, in her Iuno inferna aspect and energized by a full-blown animus of rage and destruction, running amuck through the world, devouring whomever he-she can lay its hands on. Hera is in this development a veritable epidemic of pathology.
The ancient cults of Hera showed great foresight and wisdom in “binding” her image during the dangerous periods of her cycle. This was prophylactic against the potentiation of the she-dragon. But what could they have done to prevent this potentiation in the face of the Typhaonian animus energizing it? Hera’s reaction to her experience with Zeus bursts all fetters, for without a full experience of the Teleia aspect of the cycle the bindings on the infernal aspect of it cannot possibly hold. Thus we find in the Homeric and classical image of her a Hera Unbound, whose boundlessness knows no limit to destruction. The rhythm inherent in the archetype has been disturbed, and we get a sort of symphony whose rhythm is one long downbeat. The restoration of a Hera Teleia is an individual and cultural-historical project that is still being worked on in our time.
NOTES
1. Cf. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 244–45. In this interesting footnote Hillman states his reasons for keeping the term “instinct” in psychology. Among other comments he makes the following remark: “We imagine the body to be either the locus of instinct or of its significance … so that the term, by conjuring up ‘body’ in one way or another, is part of the body’s reverberation in consciousness.” To speak of instinct in connection with archetypal images, it seems to me, gives them “body.”
2. Raphael López-Pedraza. “The Tale of Dryops and the Birth of Pan,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1976): 184. Cf. his interesting note to this section: “The idea of human nature having two parts—a part that does not change and a part that moves—is valuable for psychotherapy … It is of obvious practical value in psychotherapy to have an awareness of these two elements, so as to localize our psychotherapeutic aims in the part that moves.” The part “that does not move” is what I refer to in this paper as “instinct.” It would be a mistake for psychotherapy to try to convert (transform, sublimate) the “mating instinct.” the Hera image is a symbol, to some other goals or uses, a mistake that fortunately it is not possible to realize in practice anyway. For psychotherapy, the goal of dealing with a Hera constellation would be to maximize the Hera Teleia aspect and to “bind” the Hera Chera and Iuno inferna aspects (cf. conclusion of this paper).
3. C. G. Jung, CW 8, par. 167
4. Ibid., par. 277. Jung discusses the relation between archetypal image and instinct in several places, importantly in his “Instincts and the Unconscious” and “On the Nature of the Psyche,” both in CW 8. The following is pertinent to our theme: “every instinct bears in itself the pattern of its situation. Always it fulfils an image, and the image has fixed qualities … The same is true of man: he has in him these a priori instinct-types which provide the occasion and the pattern for his activities, in so far as he functions instinctively … This sets a narrow range to his volition … We may say that the image represents the meaning of the instinct” (CW 8, par. 398). Thus the image of Hera will tell us about the meaning of the “mating instinct” and will describe its vicissitudes.
5. This phrase is Freud’s, from a paper delivered in 1915 entitled “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.”
6. For a competent review of the various scholarly positions on this subject, cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston Beacon Press, 1950), pp. 66–68.
7. Ibid., p. 66.
8. Ibid.
9. Karl Kerényi, Zeus and Hera: Archetypal Image of Father, Husband, and Wife, translated by Christopher Holme (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), chap. 5 and 6.
10. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, pp. 67–72. Guthrie’s point is that “Hera was originally a local form of the Earth-mother, promoting the fertility of all her creatures and identifying herself with their life … the original nature of Hera is unimportant, so much had the Greeks transformed her. Of her original functions only her authority over marriage was widely recognized” (p. 72). This view seems to me to miss the specificity of Hera as “mating instinct,” a specificity that she clearly possessed from earliest times. Instead, it collapses Hera into Demeter, which for the reasons given in this paper seems to me an obvious mistake and one that would lead to grievous misunderstandings in life and in psychotherapy.
11. Jane Ellen Harrison, Mythology (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1924), p. 93.
12. Kerényi, Zeus and Hera, p. 98.
13. Ibid., p. 139. The connection between Hera and her role as proponent of marriage must not be seen, however, as an accommodation to historical necessity. The essential point is that she symbolizes the mating instinct apart from, and prior to, her hieros gamos with Zeus. As Kerényi puts it: “The two unions of these deities, the conjugal union and the sibling union, are more than could have been motivated by the coming together of two religions. The unions must have corresponded to possibilities stored up in the original character of each of the two deities” (p. 93).
14. Hera is the primary archetypal-instinctual motivator within the happening of hieros gamos, consummatio matrimonii, and mysterium coniunctionis. For this reason it seems especially crucial for Jungian psychology to come to a clear understanding of her nature and her ways, speaking and writing as much as we to about this phenomenon. The central significance of the marriage There he for Jung himself is plain, as his autobiography so eloquently attests. tells of a vision: “I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills began. The valley ended in a classical amphitheater. It was magnificantly situated in the green landscape. And there, in this theater, the hierosgamos was being celebrated. Men and women dancers came onstage, and upon a flower-decked couch All-father Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad”; C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 294. This is the final version of three marriage visions, which he experienced during his recuperation form a heart attack. It is a vision motivated and culminating in Hera Teleia.
15. Kerényi, Zeus and Hera, p. 98.
16. This sentence is from H. J. Rose’s Handbook of Greek Religion, quoted in Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, p. 67.
17. Kerényi, Zeus and Hera, p. 125.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 98.
20. Ibid., pp. 129–30.
21. Ibid., p. 164.
22. Ibid., p. 157.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p.178.
25. Ibid., p. 51.
26. Ibid., pp. 108–9.
27. Ibid., p. 139.
28. Ibid., p. 51.
29. Karl Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1951), p. 195.
30. Kerényi, Zeus and Hera, p. 129 n. 71.
31. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks p. 150.
32. The connection between jealousy and Ares is made in the author’s unpublished paper “On Jealousy”: “Along with our English word ‘zealous,’ ‘jealous’ is derived from the Latin zelus and the Greek zaylos. The Greek zaylos is defined by Liddell and Scott as ‘eager rivalry, emulation … any strong passion, esp. jealousy: zeal or emulous desire for a thing … The element of rivalry … is crucial; jealousy is constellated in a love triangle. The emotional quality of jealousy is indicated by the Greek verb zeow, which means ‘to boil, to seethe: generally, to boil-up … also simply to be hot, to throb with heat …’ This nexus of verbal and etymological associations locates jealousy in the realm of Ares, whose name means ‘zeal’ or ‘mania’ Ares is the volatile and quick-to boil-up God of warfare. His birth is rooted in his mother Hera’s fierce jealousy.”
33. Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press 1968), p. 4.
34. Cf. Murray Stein, “Hephaistos: A Pattern of Introversion,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1973): 35–51.
35. The Homeric Hymns, translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976), “Hymn to Apollo,” 11.351–52.
36. Ibid., 11.309–25
37. Cf. Rene Malamud, “The Amazon Problem,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1971): 1–21. Following Walter Otto’s account of Athene in his Homeric Gods, Malamud discusses Athene as the “reflective anima” associated with an “interiorizing process” of the warrior. It is precisely to this interiorizing process in her husband that a Hera reacts so violently, because it renders her marriage into a mere formality, an institution of hollowness. Hera is not interested in the institution of marriage qua institution; rather, she finds her fulfilment in the gamos which marriage-as-institution usually empties of vitality. It would be interesting to do a statistical survey on how many marriages end in divorce precisely because Mera (whether this appears in the wife or in the husband is immaterial) was not fulfilled in them. Were this possibility recognized, our high divorce and re-marriage rates might become more intelligible. quite so frustrating to a Hera as a self-sufficient, inward-turning token spouse.
38. Homeric Hymns, “Hymn to Apollo,” 11.326–30.
39. Ibid., 11.344–48.
40. Ibid., 11.349–51
41. Ibid., 11.353–54.
42. Ibid., 11.302–4.
43. This phrase, “the intolerable image,” is borrowed from Niel Micklem (who in turn credits it to López-Pedraza). Micklem, in an unpublished paper on paranoia, uses the term to account for a psychological factor, an image, “of such devasting proportions that the psyche simply will not bear it” (quotation from memory). Micklem intuitively associates this image with the “horrible mother” images, such as Medusa. I am suggesting in this paper that this image may well arise out of a conjunction of Typhaonian animus and Iuno inferna, the conjoined power and overwhelming force of Typhaon and the she-dragon.
44 Slater discusses “Greek madness” in The Glory of Hera, focusing on the psychogenic mothering of women in fifth-century Athens (pp. 49–53). His treatment of this subject is largely hypothetical but interesting nevertheless as a bit of possible psycho-history.
45. Homeric Hymns, “Hymn to Apollo,” 11.355–56.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 105–19
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