Demeter (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Demeter is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of grain and harvest, mother of Persephone. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is one of three vulnerable goddesses, with Hera and Persephone, whom Bolen groups as the goddesses of the traditional roles of wife, mother and daughter, whose identity and well-being depend on a significant relationship, and who in myth were raped, abducted, dominated or humiliated by male gods; their mode of attention she calls, after Irene Claremont de Castillejo, “diffuse awareness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 133–135). The woman in whom Demeter predominates, as Bolen describes her, has a strong maternal instinct, which Bolen does not restrict to biological motherhood: the drive to bear and raise children extends to feeding, caring for and sustaining others, and predisposes her to the nurturing or helping professions. Her strengths are generosity, steadiness and practical care. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern are drawn from the myth of the grieving mother: depression, the “empty-nest” depression among it, when a child or a significant relationship is lost; an inability to say no, to her children or to anyone who needs her; the passive-aggressive behaviour into which resentment then leaks; and a tendency to overcontrol.

The definition excludes two things. This is not Demeter the goddess, whose cult at Eleusis is described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not Jung’s mother archetype or the Great Mother of his followers. Those are an archetype, known through images from the personal mother to the earth and the devouring witch, present in every psyche; Bolen’s Demeter is a type of woman, a disposition some women have more strongly than others. It is recorded here as hers, one of seven goddess patterns for women (1984).

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter “Demeter: Goddess of Grain, Nurturer and Mother” of Goddesses in Everywoman, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985, and reissued with a new introduction and the subtitle Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives in 2004 and again in 2014. As in each chapter, the myth comes first and the pattern is then followed through a woman’s life.

The myth is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is public domain. Persephone is carried off by Hades with Zeus’s consent; Demeter wanders the earth for nine days with torches, refusing food (ll. 40–53); disguised as an old woman at Eleusis she nurses the prince Demophoon and tries to make him immortal until his mother interrupts (ll. 231–274); and then she makes the earth barren:

the ground would not make the seed sprout, for rich-crowned Demeter kept it hid — Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), ll. 301–320, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Gutenberg #348

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Zeus gives way: Persephone will spend a third of the year below and two parts with her mother (ll. 441–469), and Demeter restores the grain and teaches her mysteries to the princes of Eleusis (ll. 470–482). Hesiod gives the genealogy, Demeter as daughter of Rhea and Cronos and mother of Persephone by Zeus (Theogony 453–454, 912–914). Before Bolen, Philip Zabriskie’s “typology of the feminine” (1974), as summarised by John Sanford (1980), had read Demeter as the feminine related to the child rather than to the man, with the power “to give birth, to love, to nourish”; Bolen lists the article among her references. Bolen’s claim to build on Jung holds better here than for most of her goddesses, since Jung wrote at length on the mother archetype and on Demeter and Kore, but he treated them as archetypal images, not as kinds of women.

The debate

The relation to the classical great mother is the central question. They share the image of the goddess who gives and withholds life, and the famine of the Hymn is the nourishing mother’s dark face. But Jung’s figure is an archetype with two poles in everyone, and Erich Neumann’s Great Mother (1955) is a structure of the archetypal feminine on which a stage of consciousness depends; Bolen’s Demeter is a personality. The closest Jung comes to Bolen’s type is a complex: his lecture on the mother archetype (1938, revised 1954; CW 9i) sorts a daughter’s mother complex into forms, beginning with an overdevelopment of the maternal instinct, which he treats as one outcome of the complex rather than as a way of being. A second difference is the pair. For Jung, Demeter and the Kore are two aspects of one feminine figure, so that every mother contains her daughter; Bolen separates them into two types, each with its own woman. The nearest earlier typology is Toni Wolff’s Mother (1951), whom Sanford matched with Demeter; Bolen draws on Wolff only for the Hetaira, which she sets beside her Aphrodite (p. 230).

Feminist criticism falls on this figure directly. Andrew Samuels (2001), without naming Bolen, wrote that women had been ill-served by literature requiring them to be containing, nourishing goddesses. Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular instance of essentialism, a universal female essence that obscures differences among women (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016), and Susan Rowland (2002) set the book among the grand narratives of goddess feminism. From the Jungian side, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) objected that Bolen identifies goddesses with personality types, whereas no person and no deity is an archetype. Bolen’s defenders could reply that her Demeter is one option among seven, not the essence of women; the critics’ point is that the seven are offered as the whole range.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Demeter as a psychological construct. Online quizzes in her vocabulary disclaim validity, and the scale attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis has no published psychometrics; we have not located the thesis. Research on caregiving, maternal identity and caregiver burnout is substantial but makes no use of the figure; the great mother entry records the narrow research that bears on Jung’s figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are the searching mother, the nursemaid of Demophoon, whom she would have made immortal, and the goddess who withholds the harvest. The Eleusinian Mysteries were built on the story, and Callimachus’s hymn adds the man cursed with insatiable hunger for cutting down her grove. Ceres blesses a marriage with harvest in the masque of The Tempest, and Milton recalls “all that pain” of her search in Paradise Lost (Book IV). Images often offered as this pattern include Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99), Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman with Dead Child (1903) and, in public life, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. All of these identifications are readings, not Bolen’s, including the guide’s own exemplars.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 9, “Demeter: Goddess of Grain, Nurturer and Mother”, pp. 168–196; also pp. 15, 132–138 (chapter 7, the vulnerable goddesses), 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.
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2); Hymn 13; Hesiod, Theogony 453–454, 912–914. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Milton, J. (1667). Paradise Lost, Book IV. Project Gutenberg #26.
• Jung, C. G. (1954). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (Eranos lecture 1938). CW 9i.
• Jung, C. G. (1941). The psychological aspects of the Kore. CW 9i ¶306–383.
• Neumann, E. (1955). The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (R. Manheim, Trans.). Bollingen Series XLVII. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01780-8.
• 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).
• Samuels, A. (2001). Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-219-4. Chapter “The secret politics of the internal family”.
• 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/
• 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).
• Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
• Kollwitz, K. (1903). Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind). Etching. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_with_Dead_Child_-_K%C3%A4the_Kollwitz.jpg