Artemis (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Artemis is a pattern in women’s psychology that the psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is the first of three virgin goddesses, with Athena and Hestia, whom Bolen groups together as independent, self-sufficient goddesses whom no male god or mortal overpowered, and whose characteristic mode of attention she calls “focused consciousness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 37–38). The woman in whom Artemis predominates, as Bolen describes her, sets her own aims and pursues them with concentration; she values independence, the outdoors and the company and cause of other women, a sisterhood Bolen ties to the women’s movement, and she competes readily. Bolen’s chapter title gives the two sides she sees: competitor and sister. The difficulties she attaches to the pattern follow from the same traits: what she calls contempt for vulnerability (pp. 67–68), a destructive rage that she reads through the myth of the Calydonian boar (pp. 68–69), and, as the growth task Artemis shares with Athena, the capacity for personal intimacy.

The definition excludes two things. The entry is not about Artemis the goddess of Greek religion, whose cults and myths are older than any psychology and are described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her goddesses archetypes, but what she describes is a type of person, and this guide records it as hers: one of seven goddess patterns for women, dated 1984, to which Gods in Everyman (1989) added eight for men.

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter of Goddesses in Everywoman titled “Artemis: Goddess of the Hunt and Moon, Competitor and Sister”, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985. Like each goddess chapter it pairs a retelling of the myth with a portrait of the pattern through a woman’s life, from childhood to old age, with its relationships, work, characteristic troubles and ways of growth. The book was reissued for its twentieth anniversary in 2004 with a new introduction and a new subtitle, Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives, and again in 2014. In the same year Bolen gave the figure a book of its own, Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman (2014).

The mythic material is public domain. Hesiod makes Artemis the daughter of Leto and Zeus and twin of Apollo (Theogony 918–920); the longer Homeric hymn to her is a portrait of the huntress on the mountains, and the Hymn to Aphrodite names her among the three goddesses whose hearts Aphrodite cannot bend:

Nor does laughter-loving Aphrodite ever tame in love Artemis, the huntress with shafts of gold; for she loves archery and the slaying of wild beasts in the mountains — Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 5), ll. 7–32, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Gutenberg #348

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

That passage (ll. 7–32) names Athena, Artemis and Hestia, the same three Bolen calls the virgin goddesses, so her grouping corresponds exactly to an ancient one. Her sense of “virgin” is older than the book, and she says so: she takes from M. Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries (1935) the virgin goddess as “one-in-herself”, belonging to no husband, rather than chaste (Bolen 1984, p. 36; Harding, chapter 8). Nor was Bolen the first Jungian to treat the goddesses as types of woman. John Sanford (1980) summarised Philip Zabriskie’s article “Goddesses in Our Midst” (Quadrant, 1974), which Bolen lists among her references and which read Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hera and Artemis as a “typology of the feminine”, with Artemis as the virgin self-sufficient unto herself. Bolen’s claim that the pattern derives from Jung holds only in part. Jung wrote about the mother, the maiden, the anima and the animus; he did not describe Artemis as a type of person, and the use of the goddess as a personality is Bolen’s, and Zabriskie’s before her.

The debate

Among the classical figures, Bolen’s Artemis has no counterpart. The nearest point of contact is the animus, read as an independent, goal-directed orientation in a woman, though Bolen’s model assigns such traits to a goddess, that is, to the feminine, rather than to a masculine component, and she argues the point against Jung’s anima–animus theory in her chapter on the virgin goddesses (pp. 43–45); Patricia ’Iolana (2016) reads the book as detaching the anima and animus from bodily sex. The nearest earlier typology is Toni Wolff’s (1951), whose Amazon is turned towards achievement in the world, but the match is not settled: John Sanford (1980) gave Artemis to Wolff’s Medial woman instead. Bolen draws on Wolff only once, for the Hetaira, which she sets beside her Aphrodite (p. 230), not for any of the virgin goddesses.

Whether such a figure is an archetype at all was questioned from inside the Jungian world. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) wrote that Bolen tends to identify gods and goddesses with personality types, and objected that no human being, and no god or goddess, is an archetype; on their reading her figures are complex configurations of archetypes shaped by ego, complex and culture. Bolen’s book was reviewed at length in the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal by the Jungian analyst Mary Ann Mattoon (1986) under the questioning title “A New Psychology of Women?”, and in Contemporary Psychology by the social psychologist Kay Deaux (1986).

Feminist criticism bears on this figure with particular force, because Artemis is the pattern Bolen most closely ties to women’s independence and solidarity. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) had warned, before the book, that unless feminists rethought the concept of the archetype they would be left either accepting patriarchal images of the feminine or conducting a rival search for female archetypes to support their conclusions. Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular instance of essentialism, the idea of a universal female essence that flattens differences of race, class and ethnicity among women (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016). Susan Rowland (2002) placed the book in a “goddess feminism” that builds a grand narrative of culture and gender.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Artemis as a psychological construct. Online quizzes built on the book carry their own disclaimers of no validity; one, the “Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale”, is attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis, which we have not located, and no psychometrics for it have been published. The nearest mainstream research concerns individual differences in agency and autonomy, which makes no use of Bolen’s figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s own instances are the myths: the huntress with her band of nymphs, the twin of Apollo, the goddess who punishes Actaeon (pp. 48, 50, 70), and the huntress Atalanta, whose part in the Calydonian boar hunt and whose race against Hippomenes Bolen uses as a figure for the Artemis woman’s growth (pp. 68–69, 72–74; Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, X). Ovid also tells how Artemis expelled Callisto from her band (Metamorphoses II); Bolen tells Callisto’s story in her Hera chapter instead (p. 140). Other classical figures often read as this pattern are Camilla, consecrated to Diana in Virgil (Aeneid XI), and Hippolytus, devoted to Artemis against Aphrodite in Euripides (428 BCE). Modern heroines such as Katniss Everdeen are sometimes offered as Artemis women; such identifications, including the guide’s own exemplars, are readings, not Bolen’s.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 4, “Artemis: Goddess of the Hunt and Moon, Competitor and Sister”, pp. 46–74; also pp. 15, 35–45 (chapter 3, the virgin goddesses), 140, 230. Pages from Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing, https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean (contents, index and running heads). Chapter titles also checked against the contents of the Harper Colophon paperback (1985), ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24226567M
• Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (twentieth-anniversary ed., new introduction). Quill. ISBN 978-0-06-057284-6.
• Bolen, J. S. (2014). Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman. Conari Press. ISBN 978-1-57324-591-3.
• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4.
• Hesiod, Theogony 918–920; Homeric Hymns 5 (to Aphrodite), 9 and 27 (to Artemis). In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses II (Callisto), III (Actaeon). Project Gutenberg #21765. Books VIII (the Calydonian boar) and X (Atalanta), Project Gutenberg #26073.
• Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BCE). In Hippolytus; The Bacchae (G. Murray, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #8418.
• Harding, M. E. (1935). Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern. Shambhala edition 1990. ISBN 978-0-87773-532-8. Chapter 8, “The Moon Mother”.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Summarising P. Zabriskie, “Goddesses in Our Midst”, Quadrant 17 (1974).
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Mattoon, M. A. (1986). A new psychology of women? [Review of Bolen, 1984]. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 6(4), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1986.6.4.13
• Deaux, K. (1986). [Review of Goddesses in Everywoman]. Contemporary Psychology, 31(6), 468. https://doi.org/10.1037/024853
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Rieker, P. P., & Jankowski, M. K. (1995). Sexism and women’s psychological status. In C. V. Willie et al. (Eds.), Mental Health, Racism, and Sexism (pp. 27–50). University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3869-9. Pp. 30–32, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 327.
• Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-2517-1. P. 150, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 40.
• ’Iolana, P. (2016). Jung and Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of the Western Goddess Movement (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
• Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html